OTRS 6 – End of life

On December 23, 2020, OTRS AG announced in their newsfeed that support for OTRS 6 would be discontinued as of January 1, 2021. On February 24, it was officially announced that the ((OTRS)) Community Edition is suspended indefinitely. Hence, there probably won’t be an ((OTRS)) Community Edition 7.

Here, we’ve compiled answers to some questions we’ve been repeatedly asked since the EOL of ((OTRS)) Community Edition 6.

Will there be security updates for OTOBO after the end of OTRS 6 support?

We’re frequently asked whether there will be security updates for OTOBO after the provisional end of ((OTRS)) Community Edition.

Absolutely!

That’s exactly what we’re here for: We developed OTOBO as an alternative to OTRS 6, considering the uncertain future of ((OTRS)) Community Edition from our perspective.

There’s no dependency. We’ll forge our own path in the future and continuously develop OTOBO.

Triggered by the EOL of OTRS 6 and the provisional end of ((OTRS)) Community Edition, the (partner) community behind OTOBO has significantly grown once again. This allows us to fully leverage the open-source advantage: the larger the community, the quicker vulnerabilities are discovered and patched.

Of course, we’ll continue to release updates and security patches as needed in the future.

If you find a security vulnerability, please report it to us so we can patch it.

What is the philosophy behind OTOBO?

We deliberately developed OTOBO as an alternative to ((OTRS)) Community Edition because the opportunities for community involvement have been restricted in recent years.
We’ve known OTRS since its early days. Our founder and CEO, Stefan Rother, was involved in building the project and the company between 2004 and 2011. Then he left OTRS AG and founded Rother OSS because he wanted to emphasize the open-source philosophy more strongly.

OTOBO is and remains 100% open source and free of charge. There will also be no paywall in the future where certain features disappear.

We want to return to a close partnership with the community and the combination of free open-source software and professional business services. We’re convinced that everyone involved can benefit from this, and we’re looking forward to the future with OTOBO.

We welcome any contribution from the growing OTOBO community.

Why OTOBO as an independent fork and not an extension through packages?

We’ve thought about this for a long time. Ultimately, we didn’t want to accept the technical and organizational limitations and uncertainties any longer.
A lot has changed just through the OTOBO customer interface – except for the basic structures.

We’ve also developed a Docker container that uses a highly performant Perl web browser as a base (Gazelle) and only uses Nginx, Apache2, or Traefik as a web proxy. This further development would not have been maintainable through OPM packages.

These changes have greatly improved performance. We’re free to continue to adopt new technologies in the future and implement our ideas hand in hand with the community and our partners.

Is migration from OTRS to OTOBO possible?

Yes, we’ve already successfully migrated systems from OTRS 7, OTRS Business Edition, KIX4OTRS, and ((OTRS)) Community Edition to OTOBO.
In many cases, this can now even be automated via migration scripts.

We will also maintain compatibility with the Znuny LTS Fork.

Is it possible to contribute to OTOBO?

A clear YES – we would be very happy.
Learn more about the opportunities to contribute to OTOBO.

We take reported issues seriously and process your pull requests as promptly as possible, promised.

If you find security vulnerabilities, please report them to security(at)otobo.org.

Translations can be contributed at https://translate.otobo.org. Translations to Brazilian, Chinese, Danish, and Japanese are already in progress there. You can ask translation-related questions in the translation section of the forum.

In the OTOBO Community Forum, you can exchange ideas with other users. And we’ll also help where we can.

Last but not least: We hope it will soon be possible to travel again. Then there will also be community events.

Is there an opportunity for an OTOBO partnership?

Yes!

It’s important for us to work together rather than against each other.

The OTOBO partner program is growing, and we’re pleased that OTOBO is on an even more stable footing as a result.

Our partners come from different regions of the world and specialize in different areas. This brings many different focuses and perspectives into the project’s development.

Everyone benefits from this – the project, service providers, and users.

You can find out more about the OTOBO Partner Program on our partner page.