Support

You cannot add another user directly, the ticket system is not a forum. The only users who can participate in a conversation are the ticket owner (the user who submitted the ticket) and the users with the Support Staff privilege for the category the ticket belongs in.

You can add CC email addresses for the emails sent by ATS. It's a feature of the User - Akeeba Ticket System plugin. The user can edit their user profile and add email addresses to be CC'ed. If you have set up the email to ticket feature the CC'ed addresses can also reply to the ticket. If you only get ticket replies over the web the other person will have to log in with the same user account as the one submitting the ticket.

I understand your use case but it's one we chose not to implement. It was a design choice which differentiates ATS from other helpdesk components. I do state that in https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/ats-for-joomla/intro-and-installation.html#introduction:  ‘Only the person who filed the ticket and specifically authorised users, called the support staff or “managers”, can reply to them. This is unlike a forum where anyone can reply.’

I think that for your use case it's best to actually email the other person and have them reply to an address monitored by the support staff. The staff responsible for the ticket can reference the received email reply in a ticket system reply and proceed. This is something we've done when we had user accounts owned by the end user and logged into by their tech staff. At some point we had to ask them for access or a server change which can only be authorised by their boss. So they had to ask the boss to either log in and reply themselves or email us so we can proceed.

As I already said:

> If you have set up the email to ticket feature the CC'ed addresses can also reply to the ticket. 

So, yes, if you set up the email feature your CC'ed emails can definitely reply to the ticket. Effectively, multiple people on the client's side (not your staff!) can reply to the same ticket.

One small gotcha, though. All replies from all client email addresses (main email address and CC'ed email addresses) will appear as coming from the same user in the ticket system: the client who owns the ticket. So you really need to tell people to not just shoot a quick reply but also write who they are if they reply to a ticket they are CC'ed to.

I have an update for you.

I have been thinking about your use case and I see why having just the Support Staff privilege can be a problem. I was also thinking how we can reasonably provide support for your use case. There were two possibilities:

• Allow you to disable permissions implicitly granted by the Support Staff privilege.
• Give you separate permissions for everything you are allowed to do with the Support Staff privilege.

The first case would be problematic because of the way Joomla's permissions work. It'd break existing sites and it'd also require you to manipulate core Joomla permissions in unintuitive ways to set up a simple ticket system. That's what I had in mind when I told this cannot happen.

The second case is something I came up with after our discussions. I realised that with the way we have rewritten Akeeba Ticket System for Joomla 4 this is actually possible.

Moreover, I am exploring whether I can let you “invite” users to a ticket, i.e. let a random user who does not necessarily have the permissions to submit replies to or even view the ticket to both view and reply to the ticket. Adding and removing invited users would be an additional privilege you can give to specific user groups so, for example, only your tech staff can do that if needed.

I will be working on implementing those features over the next couple of months with a projected release date around late September to early October (I'm taking most of August off; I've been working 3 years straight because of the pandemic).

In the meantime you can of course handle this with the email method we discussed above, as a temporary workaround.