Charting and Reporting for OCS

Charting and Reporting for OCS is an XML based charting engine rendering statistics from your Office Communications Server in a cool flash bar graph or pie chart. The information is retrieved using SQL queries inside XML pages and viewed on pages hosted from the IIS webserver.  The databases we are retrieving the information from are the LcsLog and lcsCDR, QoEMetrics, ACDDYN and RTCCONFIG.  For more information on these databases visit the following links:

http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/communicationsserversqldatabase/thread/433629ad-faa0-40b3-b0bb-42cb5c5dd8e5/

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd425133(office.13).aspx

http://www.ocspedia.com/Misc/NewDatabasesInR2.htm

Users may add, delete or modify all charts manually and may optionally apply an intuitive filter to customize the data into more usable, focused information using the interface built into the charting and reporting page. Here are some examples of charts we have been working on for a help desk call center, which we have applied said filter to access the Inbound/outbound queue data from a PBX calling system for a help desk:

Inbound Calls by Hour of Day

Inbound Calls by Day of Week

Average Duration of All Calls by Day of the Week

Calls by Hour of Day

For more charts and information visit:

http://www.instant-tech.com/Archive_Viewer_OCS.cfm

http://www.flickr.com/photos/instant-tech/sets/72157624471098721/

IQM V4 Feature Update – Inviting any user from the Sametime Directory to a Queue conversation

This has been one of the most prominent feature request by our existing Queue users and evaluators. This allows the expert to quickly send invite to any Sametime user who would be subject matter specialist into a Queue conversation with a visitor.

The feature is available to experts via a Sametime plug-in. While in a chat conversation expert can quickly use the invite option as highlighted in the following screenshot:
 

Using the invite option will display the following dialog which allows expert to quickly search and pick any user from the Sametime Directory:

Once the users have been selected an invite to Multi party chat conversation is sent to the users

After the users accept the invite they are able to assist the visitor via the NWay chat window.

Amazon Cloud

Amazon EC2 cloud computing has been very interesting and useful. I and others at Instant Technologies use these Amazon instances for testing and they have been very helpful to us in many ways. One pretty obvious advantage is that the server doesn't shut down every time a snow storm hits the area and knocks the power out. Another is that you don't have to maintain the server in a physical space, be it office or home and keep upgrading the machine or buy new machines each time our customers need testing on new software. For example, Microsoft now has a requirement for 64 bit machines for hosting their OCS software. If you are stuck with 32 bit machines in the office, then your machines quickly becomes obsolete. Another great feature is how I can stop and start these Amazon instances, and only pay (well...Instant Technologies pays), when there is a need to use them. I can take snapshots of drives and attach /detach them to any instance from any previous snapshot state using the very handy AWS Management Console, which once you get the hang of it can be very easy to use.

Also, please correct me, if I am wrong but there seems to be one very large disadvantage with Amazon. The problem is the tiny C drive you receive, when launching a large instance (64 bit machine). 10 gigs! Unless you are good at remapping things or moving space between drives and so on, which I am not, this is something that you have to live with. These large images are extremely expensive and are almost the cost of renting your own office, if you keep it running 24/7, so it really is a shame we only get this amount of hard drive space.

I am still learning and a lot of it, mostly learned through trial and error, unfortunately. There is one very important issue that came up, which may have been solved had I actually read the instructions. It's to make sure that before you bundle your images, to uncheck the "Use hexadecimal name for each instance after bundling". This setting is located in the Program files of the C drive. If you do not, your computer name will change after bundling and when you are ready to run the new instance, some references in your software will remain pointing to the original computer name. This can really mix-up some software configurations, namely the Microsoft Office Communications Server. Another thing, I've learned, is to take snapshots of drives. This became important due to having many important files that our Sql server had stored on two other drives. When you bundle an instance, it only copies the C drive, which means you must copy your D, E, etc. drives to a volume before bundling. There is probably a better way but I did this by just copying and pasting all files from each drive to a volume after attaching them and taking a snapshot of each. I then, have these drives as backup for the next instance I would like to launch.

Now, there are even more features, just introduced and a lot of things I've mentioned above may have changed or improved. There have been new tabs that include better handling of buckets and just a gamut of new stuff  in the AWS management console that I have not played with yet and have no idea about...time to play catch-up once again but hopefully after reading some instructions first.

Sending messages to off-line users of Microsoft Communicator

We are working on a solution to capture messages to off-line users of Microsoft Office Communicator. We would like to capture these lost off-line messages that are never sent to the intended recipient and store them in a Sql database before they become lost or are sent to email. When an offline user of these messages become active, we would then alert the user, similar to IM tools such as Yahoo Messenger.

We are working with MSPL (Microsoft Sip Processing Language), which is a scripting language used for filtering or routing SIP messages combined with C# to capture the message. For delivering messages, the UCMA API is used.

We have bumped into some hurdles for capturing the messages, for instance, we were able to capture the message and the user initiating the message to the recipient but the message seemed to be encrypted in a UTF-8 format. We found a way to decrypt this message using the Class library in C# called system.text.coding and is now readable in a plain text file.

Now that the hardest part is over, or so it may seem, we can concentrate on sending them to the recipient when he/she becomes online. We will need to monitor who becomes online and send these messages using a windows service. The good news is, we already have an application that monitors offline users and sends an alert to these users, when they become active. It is called Instant Alert Manager for OCS so this is not entirely new territory for us and has given us a head-start.

There is still quite a lot of work to do. For example, storing data in a Sql Database and creating tables to store the data and deleting the data after the information has been sent. Also, capturing messages sent to users in various states, ie., busy, do not disturb, be right back. What if, users are a way on vacation, what to do with these messages, should there be an expiration time and then have the messages sent to an email, etc., etc. Nevertheless, much progress has been made in a short time and we will continue to find the best solutions. We will continue to update our latest findings and possibly give more details as we progress.

Queue Manage V4 Updates -

This week, we have been extremely busy adding additional enhancements to Queue Manager V4.  All of the enhancements are a direct result of customer feedback and customer requests. 

By default, the system has been enabled to notify experts when a person is waiting in the queue. The broadcast options for the queue will determine the expert notification settings.  We know that the notification system for experts is very important and we will continue to invest time, and design ideas, on this area. 

In addition to sending IM alerts on Sametime, Microsoft OCS, and XMPP, we now also support the ability to alert experts using Twitter.  If the expert is not online in an IM system, then we can send the expert a tweet and let them know that someone is waiting in the queue and needs help.  Our directory system now supports some additional fields necessary for the Twitter support.

Updated web client so that it can be easily configured by the installation process.  Now all files use relative path and settings are saved in a single file.  This should dramatically improve the ability to quickly customize and deploy the web client

Updated the plug-in to support Sametime Connect 8.5.  The updated plugin also supports server based text replies, the ability to accept multiple chat conversations, and the embedded monitoring panel.  The monitoring panel has also been updated to show the high level queue activity as well as a drill down details level view of each queue.

In order to help provide experts with standard replies, we have added the ability to store, and manage, server based text replies within the administrative system.  These server based text resources are integrated into the Sametime plugin.

The Sametime plugin retrieves the list of server based replies and provides the list to the expert using a custom icon:

Updated ITF so that newly created Queue comes online without restarting Apache.

Updating LDAP browser code to support sorting of entries

Added support for $surveyURL

More information on surveys will be available next week. 

Peyton

Updates to Archive Viewer for Microsoft OCS

We have recently made several updates to our Archive Viewer for Microsoft OCS.  Most of these updates are based on customer feedback. 

Within our scheduling and mailing system, we now support authentication via public AD groups.  Several of our customers required keyword searches within groups and then schedule those keyword searches on a daily or weekly basis.  Prior to this update, pubilc group queries were not supported.  We now support scheduled keyword inspection against public groups defined in Active Directory.

Here is the initial search criteria

 

We then save the query to a project and have the ability to schedule the query:

 

We have also added a central landing page to help provide a more centralized user experience.

Instant Updates for week of May 28, 2010

This has been a very busy, and successful week at Instant. As usual, we are working on multiple products - but all with an extreme focus on enabling our customers with improved enterprise IM applications.

IMtegrity, our high performance archiving and compliance product for Lotus Sametime, now support installations on Sametime 8.5 servers. Right now, this installation involves a very easy modification to the standard IMtegrity installation workflow. Keith has been busy with customer installations and so far all of our customers, and evaluators, are very happy. IMtegrity continues to successfully handle the Sametime archiving requirements for some of the largest financial service institutions in the world. Thanks Keith for a terrific job with these installations.

Instant Queue Manager V4 has experienced a series of updates this week. We have recently added a very nice installation process for the Apache server component and this has dramatically reduced the installation complexiy and overhead. This update is a direct result of numerous installation and our desire to save time - for both our customers and our internal engineers. We have also streamlined the Notes installation process. Our goal is to provide our customers with an installation process that can be completed in less than 30 minutes. Thanks to some exceptional patience, and assistance, from several wonderful people within a large financial company in Toronto, our installation process has dramatically improved this week. Thank you Chris and Fred!


We have also updated our Team Sessions Sametime plugin to support Sametime 8.5. We are starting to see an uptick in the Sametime 8.5 installations.

We are also seeing steady growth in the Microsoft OCS server deployments. We continue to improve our Archive Viewer for OCS and have recently added a much improved landing page, improved support for group level ACLs, as well as continued performance improvements. This week, we are pleased to welcome several new customers to our Archive Viewer community. We are currently working on a new charting and reporting module for Microsoft OCS and some screen shots will be posted shortly.

Some sample web based queues and bots

Instant Technologies has been developing and deploying web based IM solutions since 2004. Our Queue Manager V4 supports a newly designed Ajax based web client that removes the earlier dependendcy on Sametime's ST Links toolkit.

The following examples demonstrate our new Ajax based web client interacting with a variety of prodcuts, such as:

• IM help desk queues
• Custom IM bots

These examples of Instant Technologies Bots show how they can be integrated with IBM Instant Messaging ("Lotus Sametime") awareness directly onto a webpage.

New Queue Manager Template Released

We have released an updated version of the Queue Manager V4 template.  This latest template supports all of the work that we have done in order to provide more detailed information on web based visitors.  Information on web based visitors will now be available to experts, the framework applications, as well as the queue logs database. 

We have also updated the charting and reporting system based on feedback from one of our favorite customers in South Carolina. 

Here is the list of updates in this latest release:
QueueMgr Template Ver 2.20 May 03, 2010


1. Form 'ITAgentLogEntry' will have the following new fields

ITLog_CustomerIDTX

ITLog_BrowserVersionTX

ITLog_BrowserOSTX

ITLog_BrowserNameTX

ITLog_WebPageReferringURLTX

2. Added new view 'by Customer ID & Date'



Instant Queue Connections V1B32 May 03, 2010



1. Startup type property added to queue and interviews

2. Monitoring Panel update Version 1.0.12 26 APR 2010

3. Control Panel update Version 1.0.3 26 APR 2010

4. Added Public group support

5. New Monitoring Panel URL for experts

6. New URL for watched Queues

7. URL to Sync Public Groups

10. Support for new line in the text resources for Queue Properties XML

11. Added page to display the supported text variables

12. Passwords are encrypted in the UI XMLs

13. Added Support for LDAP based directories

14. UI related bug fixes



Instant Measurement Suite Template v1.14 Apr 21, 2010



1. Charts 'All Chat Logs\Open Conversations' and 'Customer\This Week' has drill down functionality

2. By Month charts have been sorted in calender order

3. Default chart for IQM will be 'Today By Queue'