New Reports Features

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In the admin interface, you'll find the View Reports tab has been improved. You can pick one, some, or all queues and get a chart and a CSV file of activity for any date range. There are also some handy controls for all reports:

1. Ignore system messages. System messages typically come from your gateways. They might say things like, "two unread messages" if the Gmail account for your Google Talk gateway has unread mail, or they might alert you that your AIM account was been signed in from another location.
   
2. Ignore not answered. These are primarily cases where your patrons return to say "thanks" or "bye" after the librarian has closed their own window. Of course, they may also represent chats that truly were not answered because the patron left before a librarian answered (hopefully there aren't a lot of these on your queues).
3. Minimum chat duration. Use this to set the minimum threshold for how long a chat must last in order for it to register in your report. It defaults to 10 seconds. This lets you weed out, for example, chats where your patron returned with a "thanks" message and your librarian quickly fired off a "you're welcome" in return.

In the case of the first two options, you probably don't want to count those as chats in your reports.

In the case of the third, it may not be possible set the perfect threshold, but being able to set a minimum duration is quite helpful. In less-busy services, you can weed through your transcripts in the Monitor Activity tab and delete records of chats you don't want to count. Then you can run your reports on everything that is left, but this may become less practical with busier services.

Here is an example of a chart; we're using the Google Charts API, so you can create a permalink. This chart shows traffic by month and by protocol for most of UNC-Chapel Hill's queues for May 2008 through today:
























I can also download a CSV to bring the numbers into Excel; in the Reports interface, there is also a visualization tool kind of like a tag cloud, but without the tags:



Remember: Besides this View Reports tab, you can also use the Monitor Activity tab to review transcripts, download transcripts in bulk, download a CSV file of all activity, delete system messages, delete transcripts, delete entire call histories. Use the Calendar Page link to perform these actions over select queues and date ranges.

Note: the information in Reports will normally be up to 24 hours old because of database caching. The information in Monitor Activity is accurate up-to-the-second.

Have fun!