Customer users and customer groups

Customer users

OTRS supports different types of users. Using the link "Customer Users" used to manage accounts of your customers. A customer can log in the system via the customer interface (customer.pl). The customer interface enables your customers to access their own tickets as well as log new ones. 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 back-end. More information about customer user back-ends is available in the chapter about external back-ends .

You can create new customer user accounts. All input fields that are marked with an asterisk (*) are mandatory and 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 specify a customer ID ("Customer#"). This ID is needed by the system to identify the user and the tickets of this user. For example the mail address of the user can be specified for Customer#, because a mail address is a unique value for a user.

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 via the graphical configuration front-end of OTRS. Using 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.