It's no accident that these latest things seem like they would be helpful for larger, collaborative services. We're grateful to the state of North Carolina for funding Eric's development time for creation of these features. Source code can be downloaded from Eric's github; these particular features are part of the webchat section.
We'll be providing more detailed documentation later (we're tired), but to briefly run down the changes:
- Queue selection. When your librarians sign in using the webchat client, they have a new option that allows them to control which queues they are monitoring. By default, they're monitoring all queues to which they are assigned in the admin interface, but they can opt out and opt back in to queues as needed. This gives you a lot more flexibility in how you build your service. For example, if you have a collaborative service, maybe your librarians should only monitor a particular shared queue for certain hours, but they should monitor some particular central queues for their own library at all times. Previously, this would have been accomplished using multiple LibraryH3lp accounts, but it's much easier now.
- Profile pages. In the admin site, there is a new tab for profile pages. These let you provide helpful metadata for the librarians who are staffing your services. Profile pages work with your administrative hierarchy, so that you can provide more general information at a high level and more specific information at the queue level. Librarians can access these in the webchat client by clicking on the queue avatar, which admins provide in the queue properties section of the users/queues tab. If no avatar is available, we provide a generic one.
- Tag for followup. This sends an email transcript, and optional note, for a specific chat to email addresses provided in the admin interface. Currently, the email addresses are for the top-level admin (the email address provided at account registration time) and for any email address provided in the user properties in the admin site for the queue owner AND the operator involved in the chat.
We know that some of these features would benefit from further customization, and we plan to get a lot of it done soon.
For example, with tag for followup, we want to show the operator which addresses will be used and also let them remove or add additional addresses. Also with tag for followup, currently, you can't see or change the email address for your top-level admin. In the future, you'll be able to edit this, but for now, if you need to change it, please email us.
We will also be providing tag for followup and profile pages on the chat management page used by external clients like Pidgin and Adium in the near future.
1 comment:
Wow! Great stuff.
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