Chapter 8. Time related functions

Table of Contents

Setting up business hours, holidays and time zones
Business Hours
Fixed date holidays
TimeVacationDaysOneTime
Automated Unlocking

Setting up business hours, holidays and time zones

Some functions in OTRS, like escalations and automatic unlocking of tickets, depend on a proper configuration of business hours, time zones and holidays. You can define default business hours and holidays for your system via the SysConfig interface. in Framework > Core::Time and additionally you can define different sets of business hours, holidays and time zones as separate 'Calendars' in Framework > Core::Time::Calendar1 until Framework > Core::Time::Calendar9. You can define calendars on a queue level and on the SLA level. This means that you can specify a calendar with 5 x 8 business hours for your 'standard' SLA but create a separate calendar with 7 x 24 support for your 'gold' SLA. Also, you can have a calendar for your 'Support-USA' queue with a different time window than your 'Support-Japan' queue. OTRS can handle up to 99 different calendars.

Business Hours

Set up the working hours for your system in SysConfig Framework> Core::Time::TimeWorkingHours or for your specific calendar, in the calendar's configuration. OTRS can handle a granularity of one hour. Checking the marks in the boxes 8, 9, 10 ... 17 corresponds with business hours of 8 AM - 6 PM.

Only during the business hours tickets can escalate, notifications for escalated and pending tickets will be send and tickets will be unlocked.

Fixed date holidays

Holidays that are on a fixed date every year, such as New Year's Day and Fourth of July, can be specified in TimeVacationDays or the corresponding section for the calendars 1-9.

Tickets will not escalate and will not be unlocked on dates defined in TimeVacationDays.

Note

By default, OTRS ships with the German holidays installed. You would need to replace these with the days agreed on in your SLA, if you have one, or to the days that are considered holidays in your company.

TimeVacationDaysOneTime

Holidays that do not fall on a fixed date each year, such as Easter, can be specified in TimeVacationDaysOneTime .

Tickets will not escalate and will not be unlocked on dates defined in TimeVacationDaysOneTime.

Note

OTRS does not ship with any One-Time holidays pre-installed. This means that you need to add holidays such as Eastern or Thanksgiving to the system when configuring OTRS. You should use the days agreed on in your SLA, if you have one, or to the days that are considered holidays in your company.