I understand that Zammad is intended to be revision-proof, and I wholeheartedly agree with this concept. Working with other software that is revision-proof, I feel, however, that Zammad lacks some flexibility.
Revision-proof usually means that you should not be able to make any changes that are untracked. Zammad solves this by simply locking almost everything down once it’s created. It’s a valid choice and certainly makes development easier but I think there are other choices that may be more user friendly.
For example, when you send or receive an email through Zammad, it makes perfect sense not to allow any manipulation of the message in Zammad. This is a case where locking the entry after creation is absolutely necessary.
But that’s not the only use case for Zammad, you can also make call notes and general notes. For those, I wish I had more flexibility.
For one, I wish I could manually set the date and time of notes and call notes. I don’t always have Zammad running when speaking to a customer and may make the entry only hours later, or even the next day. Other notes I may enter at any moment in time. Allowing me to set the date is not in conflict with being revision-proof as both dates, the actual date of the entry (creation date) as well as the chosen date (record date), are supposed to be stored, and shown in such a case. But the record date should define the order in which items are displayed.
Technically, I’d just add the date and time field to the note entry. If it’s not touched, creation date and record date are the same. If it’s changed, then the record date will deviate from the creation date. So, basically, nothing changes for people who don’t need this feature.
Secondly, I’d really like to be able to edit notes. I may have made a typo, I may not be happy with my phrasing, I may want to add a document to the note which I initially forgot etc etc. In short, I think there are many valid reasons wanting to change an internal note, and maybe even a call note. I understand there have been discussions on this forum about this before but the ones I’ve seen ended without a clear conclusion. In my opinion, this, too, could be solved without hurting the intention of remaining revision-proof. I see two ways of handling this. Either we want to keep things locked down after first entry but we allow additional entries that are clearly marked as such, with their own date and time. This way, the original entry cannot be changed but it could be expanded. This is the way many forums work where edits are no longer allowed after a certain time but additions are. The second way, and my personal preference, is to be able to change the original text directly and just keep a log of all text revisions. The original entry can easily be retrieved if and when needed.
I can only assume that it would be quite complex to add these features to Zammad and I have no illusion that this will happen soon. But it would be nice if the developers would agree making such changes at some point in the not too distant future.
Vic