Greetings: This isn't a how-to technical question. I'm just interested in how others are using OTRS.
We are a small IT company and until recently we were running OTRS 2.47 with ITSM on an Amazon EC2 Small instance. We replaced a commercial helpdesk system which used the JBOSS stack on a Windows box about a year and a half ago with OTRS 2.47. The old helpdesk was ugly, buggy and barely ran. OTRS did everything we wanted and reduced our costs because a Linux instance was less expensive. We were very happy and have never thought about turning back. Recently Amazon had a hiccup with their EBS storage and I took advantage of that hiccup to go ahead and upgrade OTRS. Provisioned an Ubuntu VM on an internal server, installed OTRS 2.47 with ITSM and uploaded our database to it, then upgraded to OTRS 3.0.11 using source. I provisioned one of the new low-cost EC2 Micro instances using a Canonical Ubuntu 10.04LTS image, then installed 3.0.11 from source, then uploaded the upgraded database from our internal server and pointed the OTRS installation to the new database.. The Micro instance gives us a dedicated OTRS server in the Amazon cloud, and the cost with EBS storage and an Elastic IP address is less than $18 per month running 24/7. The micro instance performs well - no latency or lagginess issues at all in our experience ( the old Windows helpdesk would not even be able to run on a Micro instance). One thing that has gotten easier is the mail configuration - We use Google Apps as our email engine, and 3.0.11 was a snap to set up using Google Apps. Once I got database backups scripted then scheduled weekly system snapshots we were set. The new interface is very slick and also seems to display better in mobile devices - I can use my Android phone to work tickets on the native OTRS interface, but I am hoping to see a customized interface for Android like the one that's already working on iPhone. That's a snapshot of our experience - I'm interested to see if anyone else is hosting OTRS in the Amazon cloud and to hear of what other platforms people are using. If anyone needs help getting OTRS running in the Amazon cloud we'll be glad to answer questions as well. I've worked with dozens of ticketing systems in over 20 years of IT work, and nothing else even comes close to OTRS in terms of bang for buck. Kudos to the dev team and the community! Rob
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