Response targets (admins)
The clock behind overdue. These are OPN's own targets for a first response, measured on OPN's calendar — not terms agreed with any institution. A case on hold (Hold… on the case page) is not counted overdue or stale until the hold ends; the target itself never moves.
Business calendar
The time zone and the hours on each weekday that count. Outside them, and on holidays, the clock stops. Holidays are the table on the page: US federal holidays are seeded; add OPN's own closures with + Add holiday. If OPN works a standard holiday, Remove it: it stays in the table struck through, so the yearly seeding can't bring it back, and Restore observes it again. Each year's date is its own row — next year's is seeded afresh and has to be removed again.
Targets by priority
For each priority: when a first response is due, as either wall-clock hours or business days, and after how many business days without activity an open or pending-internal case is stale. Critical stays on the wall clock — an outage on a Saturday doesn't wait for Monday. The defaults: critical 1 wall-clock hour; high the same business day; normal 1 business day; low 3 business days; stale after 3 business days.
There is deliberately no "business hours" unit. Everyone reads "24 hours" as a day of wall time, and 24 business hours of a ten-hour day were two and a half days.
Housekeeping windows
Three windows sit beside the calendar. Auto-close resolved after — a resolved case nobody reopens closes itself after this many days. Archive closed cases after — a closed case is exported to the archive store and its text redacted after this many days (the preview and a manual run are on this page). Keep unattached messages for — a received message that reached no case (unrouted, spam), a duplicate of one, a sign-in link or a verification code is removed from the Messages log after this many days; a message on a case stays with the case.
How business days are counted
A business day ends at close of business — the closing time on the calendar above, in its time zone.
- The day a case arrives is day zero, if it arrives while OPN is open. A case that arrives after close, on a weekend or on a holiday belongs to the next business day, which becomes its day zero.
- N business days means by close of business on the Nth business day after day zero. Holidays and weekends are skipped, not counted.
- So 0 is "by close of business today" and 1 is "by close of business the next business day". A case received Monday at 09:00 and one received Monday at 17:55 are both due Tuesday at close.
With the default calendar (08:00–18:00 Eastern, Monday to Friday):
| Received | Same business day | 1 business day | 3 business days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tuesday 10:00 | Tuesday 18:00 | Wednesday 18:00 | Friday 18:00 |
| Tuesday 17:55 | Tuesday 18:00 | Wednesday 18:00 | Friday 18:00 |
| Tuesday 20:00 (after close) | Wednesday 18:00 | Thursday 18:00 | Monday 18:00 |
| Friday 10:00 | Friday 18:00 | Monday 18:00 | Wednesday 18:00 |
| Saturday 11:00 | Monday 18:00 | Tuesday 18:00 | Thursday 18:00 |
Staleness counts the same way: "stale after 3 business days" is close of business on the third business day after the day of the last activity.
What happens when you change something
Every open case's due time is recomputed within the hour — a target moved, a holiday added, a case's priority changed. Nobody can edit a case's due time by hand: it's a measurement of responsiveness, and the only way to move it is to change the target or the priority. A promised-by date on a case is a different thing — a commitment to the customer, set on the case itself.