Support

Notifications: We have indeed thought about adding Web Push support. There is a small catch. You'd need to explicitly provide consent in the browser, for each browser and device you want push notifications delivered. How to best handle that is still under consideration.

Search extensions: I have said before that no search engine makes sense for a helpdesk using private tickets. By definition, private tickets are only visible to their creator and user groups with special permissions. The “only visible to their creator” part is what throws search engines off. Most search engines treat all content as public. Some search engines may have groups of content and you can tell them which groups to search. No search engine supports the “only visible to their creator”. We'd have to create our own search engine, but that's an undertaking that's far greater than writing a helpdesk extension. ATS doesn't even make profit, we can't possibly finance an undertaking even bigger than that to make an even bigger loss. It would make not a lot of sense.

Hooks: What if I told you it's already there, just behind two levels of abstraction? All email is sent through Joomla's Mail extension. This means that Joomla always calls the onMailBeforeRendering plugin event (see \Joomla\CMS\Event\Mail\MailTemplateEvent for its arguments). The $templateId argument for ATS will be something like com_ats.owner_private_new. What its email template is supposed to notify you about is shown in \Akeeba\Component\ATS\Administrator\Helper\TemplateEmails. Armed with that knowledge you can create a system or ats plugin which handles the onMailBeforeRendering plugin event, checks the $templateId to match “interesting” events, and sends notifications using whichever method you care to implement. That's how we will eventually implement Web Push – for that plugin the only question is how we will handle the browser request, which is the part I am still considering.

As for decoupling notifications from email sending: no. Right now, you can set Receives System Email to No in the user record to disable email sending to the user. If we decoupled notifications from email sending you'd also need a user plugin to add notification controls to the user profile to comply with privacy legislation around the world. It becomes very complicated very fast.

Emails as ticket input: It's been implemented for very long time. Please see https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/ats-for-joomla/receiving-emails.html. You can even combine it with Guest tickets and the Akismet service to let anyone's email end up as a ticket, while keeping (most) spam out.

Search engines: For the purposes of understanding my reply, please consider that Smart Search is a search engine.

Test mail connectivity: Turn on logging and debug mode in Joomla!, go to ATS' automation page and run the fetch mail plugin. Why reinvent a perfectly round wheel?

User notes: This is what user tags are for :) In a helpdesk environment you usually need to know which people are ‘frequent fliers’, which people are generally rude, which people are usually very short but not to be confused as rude, and which people are VIP. Frequent fliers are kinda obvious because of the ticket count and agents also do remember them. For the rest you can assign innocuous tags. Best assign tags in the form of UC001, UC002, etc and train the agents on their meaning. If you really want to write a novel about each user, you can have a tag which means “Look at the Manager Notes on this guy's very first ticket” and put your notes there. Users can't delete their tickets anyway.