Release Note

OTRS 2023.1.1

November 27, 2023 — OTRS Group, the world’s leading provider of the OTRS service management suite, including the fully managed OTRS solution and the ITIL^® 4-compliant IT service management software OTRS::ITSM, today announces the first release of OTRS 2023.1.1.

Rolling Release:

This is the first rolling release of OTRS.

OTRS no longer has a version number. OTRS is the direct successor to OTRS 8. As previously announced, upcoming releases will be staggered as needed. OTRS has still an internal build number so that the Customer Solutions Team as well as yourself can always identify your incarnation of OTRS. This step combined with a lot of effort in automation and testing gives us the opportunity to deliver a product with more value for you. The communicated maintenance calendar for infrastructure updates remains unchanged for the time being.

There is no longer a schedule for the OTRS platform itself. However, the procedure remains the same. When we create a new release, you will receive this pre-release note with all the changes. After that, our early adopters and test systems will receive the update as soon as possible and a week later, if all lights are still green, all production systems will be updated.

For this release, the OTRS update and maintenance will take place on the same weekend.

As a special feature, we have made some significant performance improvements possible with the new release.

Announcement: dependency change for on-premises systems.

OTRS currently supports Node.js version 16, which is no longer supported by the vendor. We will migrate to Node.js version 20 in the next release or the release after next. For customers running OTRS On-Premise, this means that they will need to prepare their server(s) to support Node.js 20. Currently we are seeing customers using CentOS or RHEL version 7.x systems as well as older Ubuntu servers that do not meet these requirements. Please consider updating your server operating system for this purpose.

Improvements

Performance improvement
Better handling of transaction data has enabled us to achieve higher system performance, especially in systems with a lot of automation such as generic agents or a large amount of ticket data.

Changed documentation URLs
The product documentation is moved to the OTRS Academy. The source code of OTRS contains many links pointing to the documentation portal doc.otrs.com. This change updates all links in the source code, including the GUI and unit tests. The documentation is available at: academy.otrs.com/doc

Autocomplete with non ASCII characters broken
When using drop-down fields (e.g. in the “Create ticket” screen), it is possible to use the autocomplete function. However, if the values contain accents, the clerk must enter exact terms (with accents), otherwise the values will not be displayed.

Fix description:
Accent-free filtering implemented.

Contrast improvements
The color contrast in different color themes was not 100% legible.

Fix description:
The contrast in various color themes has been improved. Dark versions in particular are now easier to use.

Security improvements for access to managed platform
If you use mechanisms to access data on your managed OTRS platform, you need to check if all mechanisms are still working. The reason for this is that we have disabled some insecure ciphers in the ssh access. For normal systems this should not cause any problems, but for very old software you need to check this. This secures both ssh, rsync and sftp access.

Bug Fixes

Ticket history is flooded with GA records. In the previous implementation, we added logging that occurs every time the ticket selection matches, although it was requested that logging only occurs when the ticket is changed. As a result, every time GA is triggered, a new record is added to the ticket history.
Fix description: GA only writes to the ticket log if the ticket has been changed. Additional note for On-Premises customers: When the DBUpdate script is executed, it may take a little longer as it performs some cleanup actions.
Priority colors are overridden each time DBUpdate is executed The priority colors are overridden each time DBUpdate is executed or a version update is performed.
Fix description: If the ticket priority already has a foreground and background color defined by the administrator, it will not be updated.
Document Search: Search Overlay: no scrolling possible in its filter area When opening the filter area in the search overlay and adding multiple filters, it was not possible to scroll the filter area on a small screen.
Fix description: Scrolling is now possible regardless of the screen size of the device.
Stats downloaded as PNG or SVG contain random data. When downloading statistics as images in PNG or SVG format, the data was taken from a random source.
Fix description: The query of the correct image from the backend has been corrected so that the real statistics are downloaded.
Overflow of communication compact article On most screen resolutions, communication of compact stream articles failed if the ticket in question had an excessively long subject and sender, e.g: subject: 213213213 213 12 312 3 12312 3 21 3213213 sender: 213213 123 12 3123 21 32 3 213 12 3 123 12
Fix description: The available space is now being used properly.
Error when creating a ticket with a dynamic field connected to a CI Linking tickets to a CI on the ticket creation screen leads to a JavaScript error and it is not possible to create the ticket.
Fix description: The handling of link data has been improved so that the link can be created correctly.

Browser Support

JavaScript is required to use OTRS.

We recommend using the latest version of your browser because it has the best JavaScript and rendering performance. Dramatically performance varieties between the used browsers can occur with big data or big systems. We are happy to consult you on that matter.

Notes:

Support for Internet Explorer will be discontinued in the future. This will be communicated in a separate announcement.

OTRS Group managed customers who are using product versions that are reaching end of maintenance and support must be updated by our Customer Solution Team by scheduling an individual maintenance appointment in order to continue receiving necessary releases and support. OTRS On-Premise customers must obtain a newer product version by ordering our migration services.