Short ticket ids in OTRS

I deployed a OTRS-based problem reporting and tracking system for my company. It allows users to send their problems in, they will be assigned a ticked id, and things are easier to track and solve in this way. The problem I had was that the ticket IDs were virtually un-quotable over the phone, being some 14 digits long. Googling around I found a discussion on Wikipedia on the same case (they’re also using OTRS), but not many solutions offered. I dug through some config options and I found that it’s possible to replace the default ticket

Go to the Admin Panel, select SysConfig link under Misc category. Then on your left, select Ticket from the Group drop-down and click “Show”. Now click on Core::Ticket link.

First option there is the so-called Hook, the prefix for all your ticket IDs. I changed it to something shorter and more related to my company than just “Ticket”.

The Ticket::NumberGenerator option is responsible for generating the ticket ID that people will see in replies to their e-mail. I changed it from “DateChecksum” to “AutoIncrement”.

Next option is Ticket::NumberGenerator::MinCounterSize, which specifies the power of ten that it will begin counting from. The default is 5 (starts from 10 000).

After changing the settings and clicking “Update” at the bottom of the page, instead of

[Ticket#: 2010081001000026]

my “customers” receive

[AH#: 0104]

Which is way easier to use, yay!