As a network admin, infrastructure planning and scalability preparation is of the utmost importance. Products such as VMware©, Citrix’s XenApp© and Microsoft’s Hyper-V© technologies have made virtualizing servers and desktops easier to manage and more accessible. It almost seems cost prohibitive for some businesses, particularly smaller start-ups, to invest in desktops.  The industry is paying much more attention to application devices that utilize a monitor port, mouse and keyboard ports, and Ethernet.  Agents then log in to a portal and do everything within the LAN.  There is no need to worry about the user backing up data locally, and control of the user’s access is more structured and more secure.

That may seem a bit scary to some, as there are concerns about bandwidth and server availability. Having that kind of structure requires maintenance times to be planned well in advance, and also requires constant monitoring, to ensure that all agents have access to the servers that they require to conduct their tasks.

Although companies certainly aren’t going to call a recycling company anytime soon to come claim their desktop systems, the industry is continuing to move toward the direction of the mobile worker. In my last post I discussed the increase in the remote worker base. With added mobility and access to corporate data, the remote worker’s tools are even more powerful and there is little downtime in opportunities to respond to work-related requests. This also allows more administrative ability to monitor company-wide network usage. With social media and its popularity gaining tread, this has caused detraction from work duties for some businesses. It is more efficient for companies to employ methods of restricting access to certain websites, or to disallow random browsing to avoid viruses and malware. This can obviously decrease productivity even more, if the user’s machine is taken offline, due to misuse or infection.

Have you experienced the “disappearing desktop”? How did you go about implementing this new infrastructure? I would love to hear from you as always.

–Travis W. Gillison

If you would like to use SOAP UI, then you can get it here. Grab the standalone version so that you have everything you need in one package.

Once you have downloaded and extracted the zip archive, launch the application and create a new project.Type in the location of the wsdl file and the project name will get automatically populated. Leave the ‘Create Requests’ option enabled.

Click the ‘OK’ button and the requests for all the web methods available to us will get created. In our example, lets chose the method ‘GetCityWeatherByZIP’  which takes in the ZIP code as the input. Do a quick test to ensure everything is working by putting in your ZIP code and hit the green arrow to execute. Your Request/Response window will look similar to below:

Now, to get the data that is of interest to us, click on the ‘Raw’ tab and you will be presented with the following:

We need to know the location of the web service, the action and xml request that we have to send.

The location is determined by looking at the POST header i.e http://wsf.cdyne.com/WeatherWS/weather.asmx

The Action is : http://ws.cdyne.com/WeatherWS/GetCityWeatherByZIP as shown in the SOAPAction header.

And the xml input is :

<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?-->

<!--Optional:-->

55416

One thing you will notice is the string

<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?-->

is missing in your request that got created. We need to add that in our XML input so that CIC can determine what encoding to use in the request. Let’s walk through another example. This time, web services build on the java platform:

The WSDL for our web service is http://soaptest.parasoft.com/calculator.wsdl.It is a simple service which will perform some basic math functions. As above, we create a new project and this time we chose to use the ‘Add’ method.

Our raw data for the request is as follows:

POST http://ws1.parasoft.com/glue/calculator HTTP/1.1

Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate

Content-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8

SOAPAction: "add"

User-Agent: Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.1

Host: ws1.parasoft.com

Content-Length: 302

Location is simple, we get that from the POST but what about the action, well, our action will be just ‘add’. There is no need to put the full URL for the action.

To finish this post off, here are some tips when using the Remote Data Query node in Attendant

1. The response we receive has to be a simple type. If we get for example, multiple cities returned and each city has the weather details within it, then attendant will not be able to bind that data.
2. Assign the URL to an attribute that can be placed at the beginning of your profile. This way, you can easily switch between your prod and dev web service instead of going through each RDQ node and making the change there.
3. Always test your web service using a tool like SOAP UI first to ensure that you understand what your input and output response will look like. Armed with this info, you will be able to troubleshoot with ease and also determine if the issue is CIC related or with something with the web service.
4. Make good use of the ‘logging’ node to log the attribute values returned from web service. It’s much easier to look at the properties of the call and follow the call log then look at the IP logs to determine what’s happening.
5. Use the string filter ‘SOAPHTTPRequest()’ in the IP Logs to get a clearer picture of what we are sending and receiving to and from the web service.

-Anish

• 3 Service Updates for CIC 3.0
• 1 Service Update for Dialer 2.4
• 2 Service Updates for Interaction Gateway
• 2 Service Updates for Dialer 3.0
• 2 Service Updates for SIP Proxy

We also saw the release of CIC 4.0 which was a fairly major undertaking. On all fronts, 4.0 showcases our ability to innovate and 2012 is the year where most of our customers will get to experience this innovation. So what makes 4.0 so innovative? Some of my favourites are:

• CIC is now a proper application server giving us the ability to virtualize it.
• Session managers can be regionalized just like media servers.
• Concurrent Licensing lets you configure more licenses that the system is licensed for.
• UI Improvements to Interaction Administration, Interaction Client and Supervisor gives a major productivity boost for day to day tasks. Some UI changes are simply jaw dropping J
• Proactive and Cradle to Grave Recordings. If you happen to click on the record button half way down the conversation, you will end up with the whole recording which is always nice to have.
• Interaction Supervisor is now part of ICBM so now one less application to install plus, you get all the performance enhancements provided by ICBM which is a bonus.
• Major reporting improvements. Too many enhancements to list but the key one is the new reporting engine which lets you drill down to details.
• No more workflows in Dialer 4.0 J

I can probably go on and on about 4.0 but that’s what 2012 is for J. Overall, we have had a busy year and there’s no sign of slowing down. Before signing off for this year, I am sharing my favorite quote:

“I don’t know what will happen next, I don’t know what I’m going to be, what I’m going to learn. But what I do know is this. Life, all life, is about asking questions, not about knowing answers. It is wanting to see what’s over the next hill that keeps us all going. We have to keep asking questions, wanting to understand, even when we know we’ll never find the answers. We have to keep on asking the questions”

So keep those questions coming  J. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

-Anish

1. Enable oAuth if it hasn’t been already enabled (Advanced Tools>Authentication>Manage OAuth Domain Key) in the Gmail setup console.

   

   We need to enable ‘consumer key’ and ‘two-legged oAuth control’.

2. Enable SMTP and IMAP providers in Interaction Administrator.

Once we have Gmail configured, we can set up our SMTP and IMAP providers as follows:

1. The consumer key and secret are the two pieces of information we need from our Gmail Setup Console for our authentication.

   

2. Make sure that the ‘Use secure connections’ is enabled.

   

   That is all we have to do for SMTP, next we add the configuration for the IMAP server. Enable SSL checkbox here as well

   

   With the providers set up, all that remains to be done is configure your users with their mailboxes

   

   I will do a follow up post to go over some more details for those contemplating the move to Gmail. If you have moved to Gmail, please drop me a line and share your experiences so that we can all learn from it. Until then, have a good day

   -Anish

You may not know this, but most of the new features and changes made within our Service Updates are direct results of the feedback we get from our customers.  I spend a lot of time testing those updates, so I am always curious to see how our product affects the real world, and how it benefits our customers by improving their productivity and profitability.  It’s this exact function of my position here that is the most exciting.

That leads me to the first topic I’d like to discuss:  innovation.  There was arguably no bigger story in IT this year than the recent passing of Steve Jobs.  His impact on the technology industry was invaluable and he has forever changed the way all of us communicate.  He had a creative mind that surpassed many others, and his products are practically commodity items, which is an impressive achievement for any company.  Steve Jobs was an innovator.  Many would call him a game changer.  His entire life was surrounded by creativity.

What does this have to do with Interactive Intelligence?  Everything. “Deliberately Innovative” is our company motto, and our Chief Executive Officer Don Brown has a clear vision of how that mantra drives our product design.  Our contact center solution has slowly focused on a niche within the telecommunications industry, bringing unified messaging to the forefront and showing our competitors that SIP is the protocol to follow.  Our product has drastically changed the way our customers do business, and I believe that many of them feel the same way we do about innovation.  It moves us forward.

Moving forward is a common phrase people hear, but I rarely see it done by a lot of businesses.  It seems “that’s the way it has always been” retains an authoritative hold over a lot of companies, and it prevents progress.  Being innovative can be a little more risky and shall we say, sexy.  Innovation, by definition, is the introduction of new things or methods.  It is the key reason our products are so dynamic, and it’s one of the reasons that our customers have been able to succeed with their business strategies.

Our upcoming Customer Interaction Center^TM 4.0 release is going to show, yet again, how innovation will help our customers.  It will help them move forward, and because change is inevitable, (especially in our industry), this is a good thing. We must all be chameleons, and continue to adapt to the market around us.  Our customers are certainly the best chameleons of all, because as they change their business structure, our product will shape itself to match their needs.

As mentioned previously, seeing how our product is used has always enticed me.  I’d like to hear from you.  How has our product helped you become innovative?

–Travis W. Gillison

The attribute PRINTER points to the UNC path of the printer we are going to print our fax to. ICAdmin account must have rights to use this printer otherwise it will fail. PRINTSTYLE can be used to set how the page will be printed. Valid values are: 0 = shrink page to fit printer paper, 1 = Chop the page at the end of the printer page, 2 = Spill over to the next page of printer paper. And the last attribute NOTIFY is for sending notification of the print job to the configured email address.  If you don’t want notifications, then just leave this attribute out.

Now, if you using Media Server for faxing, all is not lost. Just create a dummy station called ‘Media Server’ and assign the same attributes as above.

Cheers

-Anish

Let give our webservice a name ‘GetQueueStats’ and proceed to define our input and output parameters

The input will accept a single parameter called ‘QueueName’ and the output will return three values ‘EstimatedWaitTime’, ‘AvailableAgentsCount’ and ‘CallWaitingCount’. If we receive any stats, we will package the data with our 200/OK response and if there are any issues, a 500/Fault message will be sent.

Once our WSDL is defined we can create a sub folder in the BIN folder called WSDL and place our file in there. Once placed in the WSDL folder, it becomes accessible to anyone who wants to consume the web service. We need to now define our filter. The filter will define what we do with the request when the web service action is called. In our I3SOAPISAPIConfig.xml file, go the rules section and add a rule there for our web service. It is a good idea to explicitly set the rules so that any other requests can be rejected as a security precaution.

<Rule soapAction= “http://acme.com/SoapListener/GetQueueStats”>
<ForwardRequest server=”default_server” soapAction=”GetQueueStats” includeTransportInfo=”1″ clientName=”I3WebAction_GetQueueStats”/>
</Rule>

The xml file is well documented so it is fairly easy to understand what each parameter means. We should be now ready to write our handler which will accept the soap request. The basic building block for the handler is going to be:

Once we validate the request, we can use the ‘ACD Statistics (Queue)’ tool step to get our stats and package it as a response.

A quick test should give us the following request and response messages.

Request:

Response:

Fault:

As you can see, I have a pretty efficient queue so don’t have any calls waiting or excess agents playing solitaire

That’s all we needed to do to get our web service operational and with the powerful tools available within Interaction Designer, we can get it to do all sorts of interesting things. The handler and WSDL from this post are attached at the end of the post so you can have a go at creating your own web service. As always, let me know if you have questions about anything we talked about so far or any other topics you would like me to post about. I would also be keen to know how other people are using soap listener to meet their day to day requirements.

-Anish

Exposing Web Services Sample