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Akeeba Ticket System

#41410 Multiple user emails

Posted in ‘Akeeba Ticket System for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
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PHP version
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Akeeba Ticket System version
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Latest post by midnight on Thursday, 05 December 2024 06:43 CST

midnight

Good morning,

first of all I am very satisfied with your software.
Unfortunately, there is one big problem that is blocking the entire project for the client.

The problem is some companies have more then one employee to create tickets. I know i can create many accounts but this is not what my client want.

My client sold licences for softwere maintenance using licence special key. They use special key as a username in ATS component.
So there is only one account for each company. But the company can have multiple user using the same licence code.

I tryed to solve that using custom field in create ticket "employee email" by user to let the staff know which company employee are creating ticket.
The problem is the ATS are sending emails only to Joomla user account which is mail company email adress. I want to send replays by ATS using "email custom field" from ticket.

 

Here is a example how it works now:

Company have user account in Joomla with email: [email protected]
Company have unique license key 123456 which is thier name to log in for all employee. So all employee using the same license for asking questions.
Employee 1 create ticket with problem filling the "custom field - emplyee email" [email protected]
Employee 2 create ticket with problem filling the "custom field - emplyee email" [email protected]
Employee 3 create ticket with problem filling the "custom field - emplyee email" [email protected] / to this step everythnik is fine

Now the probem is after staff reply:
staff reply to ticket from Employee 1 and the reply email are send to "Company Joomla user account email" instead to "custom field email" from ticket.
staff reply to ticket from Employee 2 and the reply email are send to "Company Joomla user account email" instead to "custom field email" from ticket.
staff reply to ticket from Employee 3 and the reply email are send to "Company Joomla user account email" instead to "custom field email" from ticket.

Now the company email account have 3 emails from site staff but none of company employee are recive notyfication on email because ATS dont have a option to send reply to different people.
Is there any chance to use the "custom employye email field" from ticket to be a reply email to send via ATS? How to make the custom field to be used to reply instead of joomla user email account.
or mayby it require hard coding in files using the database fields. I will use any option now my work is on the edge now ...

Regards
Patrycjusz

 

 

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

You will not be able to do what you're trying to do. The logic about which email addresses are used to send emails to and receive emails from are hardcoded in \Akeeba\Component\ATS\Administrator\Model\EmailSending, \Akeeba\Component\ATS\Administrator\Helper\TemplateEmails, and the entire plg_ats_mailfetch plugin. Changing them requires you to essentially maintain your own fork of ATS which is impractical at best.

To be fair, even if you were using a helpdesk service such as ZenDesk you'd still have the same problem. The entire idea of selling access to a single support user account when you know your clients require multiple users to receive support independently is conceptually flawed and should've been caught at the design stage, or at least at the proof-of-concept implementation stage. Fixing things in production is always going to be painful.

The only way I can think of to salvage this situation is to change the concept of support. It makes sense to create one user group per client company, adding its users to that group. This way, each person in need of support has their own user account, but they are all tied together by the user group they belong to. The major drawback is that you need to create a custom component to allow the “master” user account (the one your client sold access to) to manage users, namely only the users belonging to the specific user group linked to that company i.e. allowing the client company to add, remove, and change the user accounts which are ‘under’ their ‘corporate account’. I am not aware of an extension which can do that, but it shouldn't be too hard to make one.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

After a cursory search in the JED, I think that maybe you could use https://extensions.joomla.org/extension/clients-a-communities/user-management/regauth/ with a different access code per client company to let its staff self-register on your site and be automatically assigned to the correct user group.

If you want to use Okta to manage the third party users (which incurs additional fees, of course) there's https://extensions.joomla.org/extension/clients-a-communities/user-management/okta-user-sync-user-management/.

Please keep in mind that I have not used either of these extensions. This is not an endorsement, or a promise that they will work in your use case. I just did a cursory search in JED about user management extensions and tried to figure out if there's something that, based on its description alone, might mesh well with your use case.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

midnight

Thank You!!!

i will check this. For now i have tomorrow a meeting with my client then we will decide what to do.
But any solution is better then none.

Regards
Patrycjusz

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