[Asterisk-Users] RE: CTI development

[David Cook]

>Or what is it that you meant in particular?

I'l bet he means 3rd party call control like in a traditional CTI
deployment ala Cisco ICM, Genesys or an oldie-but-goodie, IBM CallPath
DirectTalk.

(Net-net version)
Basically, a scratch-pad type area of ~2K that gets created/destroyed
with every call and _follows_ the call for its life in the system. Olus
the ability of a 3rd party computer application aka "softphone" to
control the telephone appliation - this part we've got but still needs
some modification for true CTI.

(Example)
So the caller gets to the IVR. The IVR pushes data relevant to the
current call onto the scratch pad using a unique call event ID then
xfers the call to the call centre Q.

The call gets allocated to an agent in the Q. Their desktop application
gets an alerting message which is basically a ring event alerting them
that they are about to get the next event including the internal ID of
the event. (In traditional environments this happens _slightly_ before
the phone rings.

The application then reads the scratch pad data associated with the call
event ID so the desktop can have full context of what has gone before
in the call. The desktop application then does whatever it needs to do
in the customer environment - this is custom development - the CTI
vendor offers an SDK for interface to their softphone product.

The desktop application needs the ability to also write/update to the
scratch pad as there may be a need to xfer the call to another agent or
back to the IVR which should be able to read the updated data.

I may not have the skill to code all of the application, but I'm a call
centre solution architect. If anyone would like to bring this
functionality to Asterisk I would be excited to offer industry advice.
There are lots of gotchas in the CTI world that are completely _not_
related to programming skill. The wrong implementation simply won't
have a market.

dbc.
--
David Cook