This has been discussed a few times in this forum already: The possibility to change ticket date and times.
I understand the argument that Zammad’s goal is to provide what has been called historical correctness. As I mentioned in other threads, I don’t think that this goal necessarily contradicts having a bit more flexibility.
Most systems make a distinction between times that refer to the system itself, such as the time when a record was created (insert date/time) or changed (update date/time), and historical information provided by the user.
Take a document management system as an example. If I upload a document right now, it will be registered to have been uploaded today, i.e. on Jan 5. It’s clear that this date may not be the most relevant one for the user, much more important may be the time when the document was sent or received, and this could have been days, weeks, months or even years ago, depending on when I started the process to digitize my documents.
As a consequence, when viewing a list of documents in a specific folder in my DMS, it’s just natural that I wish to see them in the order of this type of date I mentioned and not the date when the document was uploaded.
Zammad seems much too strict in this regard and for no good reason.
Here’s just one specific use case where this strictness leads to false results from the user’s point of view.
Before I started working with Zammad, we used to do Support over regular Email. We really like how easy it is to structure and search for information in Zammad, so it would be great if we could move our old emails there, too, and have one single point of information for past and present support tickets.
If I move these emails to the inbox that Zammad queries, Zammad ignores the date in the header and creates a new ticket with today’s date. For this reason, I cannot even dump just all emails into the inbox and wait for Zammad to sort them all out, this will just create a huge mess and none of the replies will be in correct order even if I merge them correctly.
But there are so many other use cases. I may have received a call when I was not at the computer and I wish to record the call date and time correctly.
I really wish it was possible for Zammad to differentiate between the insert/update time of an entry and the time the user gives it. This wouldn’t break any historical correctness or auditability, it just would make our lives quite a lot easier.
Also, it would be really so helpful if Zammad would respect the date/time in the email message header, particularly in the received section. This information is provided by the email server that is usually administered by the same person or team as Zammad itself so it should be safe to consider this date correct. And again, Zammad could still register the system insert time which may deviate from the received time.
Having said all that, we’re huge fans of Zammad and in comparison to what the system does for us, these are minor points.