Sunday, August 30, 2009

Updates to queue selection feature

Pam Sessoms 3:31 PM

Last weekend, we released the queue selection feature for the librarians' webchat client. It introduced a new button inside the client that let librarians select their queues. Queue selection is persistent across logins. That is, the selected queues stay that way across multiple logins until the librarian changes them.

This weekend, we tweaked queue selection in the webchat client a bit to address a couple of things:

Librarians may not remember which queues they last had selected and may not always remember to check each time they log in. This may result in queues getting left unstaffed accidentally.

Librarians may unwillingly receive offline messages (or just ill-timed new regular messages) from queues they do not wish to monitor since they cannot de-select queues before the messages arrive.

We're addressing these situations in the following manner if the librarian is assigned by the admin to more than one queue:

Upon login, the queue selection dialog is opened automatically.
The librarian will not receive any chats from queues.
Once the librarian has dismissed the queue selection dialog, they will be able to receive chats from queues.

This way, the librarian can see which queues they're monitoring at each login, can make adjustments if desired, and will not receive any incoming chats until they have selected the desired queues.

If the librarian can only staff a maximum of one queue because the admin has only assigned their account to one queue, then the webchat client does not display the queue selection dialog at login time.

Now, what about queue selection on external clients, like Pidgin, Adium, and the Meebo website? This question came up on the Group last week, and it's a great question. Initially, we didn't think we could do anything to support this feature in most external clients, aside from possibly Psi, in anything other than the long term.

However, we've been thinking about it, and we have a new idea, one that will work in ALL external clients and can be implemented quite quickly.

We will create a bot for queue selection, and then the bot can optionally be buddied by libraryh3lp users. If users have this particular bot buddied, each time they login, the bot will IM them with something like:

"Hi there librarian-pam, you are currently watching the following queues: ref-desk, refworks. You are NOT watching: endnote, circulation. Send "watch queue-name" to add a queue. Send "drop queue-name" to stop watching a queue. Send "status" to review your queues. Send "help" for further instructions."

Anytime they want to change queues during a shift, they will fire off an IM with the desired commands to the bot.

Of course, this is not as friendly as nice graphical interface, it will require training, and it still may intimidate some librarians. However, it will allow queue selection to be available to all clients, which is very exciting!

This queue selection bot is not yet available. We'll blog about it when it is, probably in a few weeks time.