Let Realtime display a friendly log-in extension

[dmcnulty]

In my A* installation, all SIP lines have alphanumeric IDs.  For a set of phones with lines dedicated to answering a queue, if the extension reserved for the queue is 290, then the SIP IDs would be sip/a290a, sip/a290b, sip/a290c, etc.  When an agent logs into a queue, the Q-Met Realtime page shows this SIP ID for the extension, as A* enters it in the queue_log file. 

The problem is that most of our agents can rove, and the SIP ID gives no clue as to where the phone is located or any of the phone's other extensions, so the manager viewing the realtime page doesn't know how to contact an agent.  My idea for improving Q-Met is to display a "friendly" name in lieu of a raw SIP ID as the agent's extension.  This is a parallel to the feature you already have for friendly agent names.   

Sound good?

-  Dennis

[QueueMetrics]

Not sure I understand, but what I would do would be to install XMPP clients so that the supervisor can simply start a chat with an agent.

[dmcnulty]

XMPP would be impractical because of the need for agents to login separately to an instant messaging system, and because the main program they run while answering calls is a full-screen desktop app. 

To reword my idea: On the picture of a real-time status panel (on pg 83 of your v30 user manual), the section called "Agents currently logged in" has a column called "Extension".  Currently, it shows the Asterisk SIP line ID the agent is using to answer queue calls.  Since the SIP IDs we use on our system are alphanumeric and generally look cryptic to the the untrained eye, it's impossible for a viewing supervisor to know the location of agent to pay him a visit or call him on another line on his phone.  My proposal would be to display a human-readable entry in the Extension column coming from a look-up table in the Q-M database.

-  Dennis

[QueueMetrics]

This sounds really specific to your environment, so I'm not sure if anybody else is interested. You could consider a customization.

[cwstevens]

It would be nice if I could define a regex or something so it would turn sip/1234_whatever into simply 1234 which makes more sense to the users,

[QueueMetrics]

You can simply create an agent with code sip/1234 and name "Mike Boo (NYC)" and this way the name will show up.

[cwstevens]

We are using hotdesking with local extensions so that we can perform some actions when we ring the agents. My extensions show up as, for example, "local/1234@theagentcontext". Do you have any advice for this situation? Thank you.

[QueueMetrics]

You should turn on agent rewriting so that they will appear as agent/1234