Customer users and customer groups

Customer users

OTRS supports different types of users. The link "Customer Users" can be used to mange the accounts of your customers. A customer can log in the system via the customer interface (customer.pl). The customer interface enables a user to manage own tickets and change the own account settings. Also a customer user is needed for the ticket history in the system.

You can search for a specific customer user in the database and change the customer user backend. More infos about customer user backends are available in the chapter about external backends .

You can create new customer user accounts. All input fields that are marked through an asterisk (*) have to contain values. Very important is to specify a account name and a password for the new user to enable that this user can log in the system. Also you have to specifiy a customer ID ("Customer#"). This ID needs the system to identify the user and the tickets of this user. Ffor example the mail address of the user can be specified for Customer#, because a mail address is explicit.

Note

To keep the consistency of the data for OTRS it is not possible to delete a customer user. To deactivate a customer user account set it to "invalid" or "invalid-temporarily".

Customer groups

Customer users can also be added to a group. this feature might be useful, if you want to add some customer users of the same company that shall only have access to one or some queues through the customer interface. First create via the group management module the group, that shall contain all customer users of the company. Then create the queues and select the new group for this queues.

The next step is to activate the customer group support. This can be done with the configuration parameter CustomerGroupSupport either via the graphical configuration frontend of OTRS or via inserting this parameter into your Kernel/Config.pm file. The parameter CustomerGroupAlwaysGroups you can specify the groups for a new added customer user, the new account will be added to this group automatically.

Through the link "Customer Users <-> Groups" you can manage which customer user shall belong to the different groups.