Advice on how to organize Agents and clients for relevant email alerts

vincentchov

System Information

Mail sending: SMTP
PHP: 7.2 (supplied by Docker container)
Operating System: Debian 10
UI: Staff-side of UI, although it will eventually include Client-side as well
Installation: Docker-Compose with campbellsoftwaresolutions/osticket (osTicket 1.14.1) and bitnami/mariadb:10.3

Summary
I'm trying to create a volunteer-run help desk system that will be used in my state, and I'm not sure how to organize Teams, Departments, etc to make sure agents don't get notifications about tickets from customers in locations that are too far away from them to physically meet the customer.

How can I make it so I can have automatic email alerts only to Agents who would like emails about X type of help in Y location?

Thank you very much for the help!

More-specific requirements

The types of help should be common across the whole state, ie, "Help with delivering groceries".
- I want to have a Customer specify which location they're asking for help in, so that Agents who would like to address "Help with delivering groceries" tickets in "Town A" can get relevant email notifications, instead of getting constant emails about new tickets from everyone in the whole state.
Agents should ideally be allowed to subscribe to multiple types of help and multiple locations.
- Example: If an agent wants to help with "Help with delivering groceries" and would like to help in "Town A" and "Town B" (and no other location in the state), they would get notification emails whenever a new ticket comes in asking for "Help with delivering groceries" in "Town A" or "Town B".

What I'm thinking I might be able to do

I know I can use Filters to look for different object attributes (such as making
"Location" a public ticket attribute), and I can then send emails. However, it asks me up front for specific email addresses, which should be dynamically generated based on who is offering help in that location.
I thought maybe I could send volunteers digest emails by searching for all tickets that were opened that day with given combination of Location and help topic (Department?), but the API documentation doesn't describe what kinds of searching is supported.
I know Teams can span multiple departments, so I could have a "Town A" team and "Town B" team with some of their agents in the "Help with delivering groceries" Department. Still doesn't address how they're actually notified.

Thanks a lot again for the help!

ntozier

So if it were me I would probably create a spreadsheet of Location areas and Agents.

hypothetical locations along I95, USA (Yes I realize that you said state) with Agents in that area:
Yonkers NY, Janus Doe
Newark NJ, Jane Dow
New York City NY, Janus Doe, Jane Dow
Trenton NJ, Thomas A. Anderson
Philadelphia PA, Thomas A. Anderson, Frederik Rosencrantz

I would then create a department for each location. (Yonkers NY, etc)
Then create Agent accounts for each person, and add them to the Departments for the areas that they are covering.
Once all that was sorted then I would worry about other things. Agents can have access to multiple Departments.

I do not think that there is a great way to shut off notifications for individual Agents, as this is set at the Department level.

The Ticket API is for opening tickets. It's very limited at this time.

You could use Teams instead of direct Department access. You could add people to the team who do not want as many notifications.

Ultimately I think that you might have to alter the code to do what you are looking for. I'll ping a dev to see if they have any additional suggestions.

@KevinTheJedi

vincentchov

Hmm, okay. So it seems that it isn't possible at the time to reduce notifications to combinations of location and help topic, unless I make some code changes.

I just spoke with some volunteers over the phone to see if we can relax the requirements, so it may be possible to live with that.

Otherwise, I could write a program that would search the database directly for the information I need and send digest emails every couple of hours or so. I was just trying to avoid that since that program could break due to an osTicket upgrade changing the db schema.

I did consider the possibility of writing a plugin that would listen for a new Ticket, check it for certain attributes (location and help topic for example), and then search for all agents whose attributes match, so I could then email them. I'm not too familiar with how plugins are written though, since the most popular unofficial guide on how to write plugins appears to be outdated.

Thank you very much for the help! If @KevinTheJedi has any other suggestions, I'd love to hear them but until then, thanks again for the help!

ntozier

@vincentchov
Glad that I could be of assistance. If you have any more questions we are here. 🙂

note: I'll leave this open in case @KevinTheJedi has any additional suggestions.

KevinTheJedi

@vincentchov

Yea we really don't have a way to configure alerts based on anything other than Global settings, Department settings, Team settings, etc.

So if I follow you correctly, you want Agents to be able to get alerts about specific topics and only from specific areas. So Agent A wants to help with Delivering Groceries Help Topic BUT only in Yonkers, NY and New York City, NY areas correct? What if you have filters that match both Help Topic and Area and then assign to specific Team. This way you can disable alerts via Department and enable alerts for the Team and the Team members will get the Ticket Assignment Alerts and be able to work on tickets. However, this would not help with New Message Alerts, etc. as these are based on Global and Department settings.

Cheers.

vincentchov

KevinTheJedi That's right. Ideally, agents should be able to get alerts about new tickets for departments they're in, but only if those tickets are also in locations they are subscribed to as well. That way, they don't emails about all "Delivering Groceries" tickets for the whole state (especially since they're probably only coordinating with volunteers in Yonkers, NY anyway).

I considered that case where I match Help Topic and a custom Area attribute, then assign to a specific Team, but it still requires someone to manually create "Delivering Groceries in Yonkers, NY" and "Delivering Groceries in New York City, NY", without me knowing if they'd get alerts anyway since a Filter would be what assigned the ticket to that team. (I know that filters assigning a ticket will disable some alerts automatically)

At that point, I might as well just create a "Delivering Groceries in Yonkers, NY" department rather than team, so as to preserve the expected email alert settings.

Thanks for the help!