Hello everyone and thanks in advance.

I am currently working on a project for the company I work for. I believe that I have started in the right direction, but was wondering if anyone had a better suggestion or maybe a little bit of help. Here's how the project will work when I'm done:

A customer calls in on our asterisk system, it then goes to our techs where it is answered and tech support is given. I would like the phone number that shows up on the tech's phones to parse and query the same database used by the techs. Then, I would like the query results (the current callers information) to pop up in a webgui or auto-refresh their helpdesk page.


After doing some research last night. I've come up with an idea using Jabber, and a simple AGI script that copies an incoming call, and sends it to a jabber username.


Now if I'm correct, all I would have to do is compile my own jabber server, and create (or modify) a jabber client to take the information it receives, query the helpdesk database, then display that information.

There are about 30 computers that are currently used for tech support and they all boot from a LTSP (linux terminal server project) server. I dont know if this will make it harder, or easier to complete this task.

I can tell that this is going to be a long project, that's why I'm posting here. To see if anyone has a better suggestion or some information that could help.

Thanks again.
-Rory

Interesting idea to use Jabber for this. Are you already using Jabber?

At home, yes. I've got a jabber server set up and it seems like a quick and easy way to transport information. Plus the asterisk agi script i already have will send the caller ID information with jabber. So that cuts my project time in half. But by all means, if you have any better suggestions, I'm all ears.

I looked into it a little and there is not much out there but it is a common feature with ACD systems. It would be nice if you could connect it to your ticketing system (web based system?). I have worked with Jabber in the past (wrote a .Net Jabber client) and it should be fairly easy to do what you want. Another option would be to customize a softphone, although I am not sure how well softphones work with LTSP.

The LTSP serves a problem when trying to connect the softphone. Thats why I've been looking towards jabber. I need a server that each agent can log into to direct the information since an IP address is out of the question. Basically, I'm going to write a Jabber client with no features at all. All I need jabber for is to receive the callers information and execute a script with that information. That script will then query our ticketing system, and yes it is web based. It's all just a theory for now. I was just wondering if anyone else had any ideas to help me along my way.

What did you write your .Net Jabber client in. I was searching last night and found a php based jabber class. I was thinking about building a web based jabber client using that. Got a better idea?

Thanks again,
Rory