Hi Paul,
The help topic issue is a pain for us also, I have thought about hacking at the code to remove the assignment by help topic but in all honesty for us it isn't that big of a deal, more of an annoyance really.
The first thing to understand is that help topics are usually quite specific in nature. For example, we are Cloud/SaaS providers, if we get an support request regarding login problems general support will handle this and select the 'login assistance' help topic, however if we get a support request because a report appears to have incorrect data in it this goes directly to our development team with a 'report error' help topic.
We found defining roles helped a lot with how we use help topics, not only defining roles but defining limitations to each role also.
Our real difficulty is when we get a customer that may have more than 1 issue, a not common but semi-regular example of this is, the user cannot get access to the admin panel (normally because the account admin in their company didn't give permission to the user) so they cannot add a new user to the company account. This is a support issue for the new user but an account management function for the permissions. Why? Because we are not allowed to assign admin permissions to a user without consent from an already listed decision maker, we also cannot create a new user without consent of an authorised admin, for all we know we could be giving admin access to a staff member who was just fired.
Our problem here is we don't want to create 2 tickets but we need 2 departments to be logged against the ticket and 2 help topics from different departments to be assigned, we simply do the highest priority ticket and then reassign when the second department needs to take over.
For the purposes of osTicket, I would think you will need to create the topic in multiple departments to meet your needs in this instance sorry mate. Just have a clear naming assignment, e.g. This Issue (Accounting dog department)
I hope the way we see this issue helps you with yours.
