OTOBO Community
Welcome to the OTOBOs
Community is a strong word, describing a group of people pursuing a common goal. Together, they strive to attain improvements. For each one of them, and at the same time for the community.
After OTRS Group's last change of strategy, the Community's possibility to participate in the further development of OTRS is very limited. In this context, the renaming of the free Open Source version may be perceived a little cynical: Only systems managed completely by OTRS Group may be called OTRS anymore. The free Open Source version has been renamed as ((OTRS)) Community Edition.
Beginning with OTRS 7, new software versions are made available as open source software for free only after a few years. The »master« development branch is no longer public at all. Thus, a real collaboration and proper involvement of the community is no longer possible.
For us, this was reason to start our fork OTOBO.
The time has come to build a new Community!
OTOBO stands for Open Ticket system. Ours – meaning all of us. Yours. The Community's. Based on ((OTRS)) Community Edition.
That's us
Meet the Team behind OTOBO
The company behind OTOBO is Rother OSS GmbH. In 2004, Rother OSS founder Stefan Rother was the first employee of the just founded OTRS GmbH in Straubing. As such, he knows OTRS and the open source project's development history (almost) from the start. And just as his long-year mentor Martin Edenhofer, he is a true Open Source enthusiast.
In 2011 both of them left OTRS AG to go back to the roots and put more emphasis on the open source idea.
The one-man-show from the beginning has grown into a strong and resilient team. Together, we provide support, consulting and development for ((OTRS)) Community Edition. And until today, support clients get feature add-ons from our portfolio for free.
Future plans
How it all started and where we are heading with OTOBO
OTOBO is based on ((OTRS)) Community Edition version 6.
OTOBO is, and will always be, open source and 100% free. Together with you, the OTOBO Community, we want to lead this solidly based project into the future.
With OTOBO 10 we build our base and concentrate on what we deem the most pressing issues:
Together with Brand and Design Agency SANMIGUEL from Munich, we completely overhauled the Customer Portal . Design and UX are up to the next decade now. We are very proud of this collaboration and the result. In coming OTOBO versions, the Agent Interface will follow suit and get a complete redesign.
Moreover in the first OTOBO version: A complete adaption of basic configurations to ease installation and implementation. By getting rid of legacy issues within the code and a complete redesign of the basic structure of various functionalities (e.g. display of ticket lists and full text search) we achieved considerable performance improvements. Moreover, we completely revised the form function, added additional functionality and a big bunch of practical feature add-ons from our portfolio. There are 67 packages and feature add-ons from our portfolio awaiting appraisal and integration. Many of them provide functionalities that have been part of the chargeable OTRS Business EditionTM or service packages in a very similar form.
We don't develop OTOBO just for ourselves but for our clients and for you – the OTOBO Community. We want to actively shape our common future. We want to work hand in hand with you to create an open source helpdesk that rediscovers the special spirit and great collaboration of the beginnings of OTRS.