8.1. Setting up business hours, holidays and time zones

From open-support.info

Some functions in OTRS, like escalations and automatic unlocking of tickets, depend on a proper configuration of business hours, time zones and holidays. You can define these via the SysConfig interface, in Framework > Core::Time. You can also specify different sets of business hours, holidays and time zones as separate 'Calendars' in Framework > Core::Time::Calendar1 through Framework > Core::Time::Calendar9. Calendars can be defined by queue settings, or on SLA levels. This means that, for example, you can specify a calendar with 5 x 8 business hours for your 'standard' SLA, but create a separate calendar with 7 x 24 support for your 'gold' SLA; as well as set a calendar for your 'Support-USA' queue with a different time window than your 'Support-Japan' queue. OTRS can handle up to 99 different calendars.

Business Hours

Set up the working hours for your system in SysConfig Framework > Core::Time::TimeWorkingHours, or for your specific calendar in the calendar's configuration. OTRS can handle a granularity of one hour. Checking the marks in the boxes 8, 9, 10 ... 18 corresponds with business hours of 8 AM - 6 PM.

Only during business hours can tickets escalate, notifications for escalated and pending tickets be sent, and tickets be unlocked.

Fixed date holidays

Holidays that are on a fixed date every year, such as New Year's Day or the Fourth of July, can be specified in TimeVacationDays, or in the corresponding section for the calendars 1-9.

Tickets will not escalate nor get unlocked on dates defined in TimeVacationDays.

By default, OTRS ships with the German holidays installed.

TimeVacationDaysOneTime

Holidays such as Easter that do not have a yearly fixed date but instead vary each year, can be specified in TimeVacationDaysOneTime.

Tickets will not escalate and will not be unlocked on dates defined in TimeVacationDaysOneTime.

OTRS does not ship with any One-Time holidays pre-installed. This means that you need to add holidays, such as Easter or Thanksgiving, to the system when configuring OTRS.