Hotseating

[grebnell]

I am running 1.6.2 in hot desk mode.  I followed the setup instructions in the documentation.  I have previously made older versions of QM work in hot desk environments by manipulating softphones in such a way that an agent always has the same device ... not ideal by any means but it worked and worked well.  Now I am trying this new option and I am not getting what I expected or what I wanted.  Clearly I am missing something. 

All the reports show calls as handled by local/XXXX@context  [where XXXX is the extension number] rather than by Agent name or Agent ID [this is with the rewiteLocalChannels = false].  If I set that to true, then calls show up as being handled by Agent/XXXX but XXXX is still the extension number so that is meaningless and so no names show up at all Agents Logged In. [When the indivual agents login to QM and see no history of their calls at all.]

In the Realtime reports,  under  Agents Logged in, I get a listing of Agents by Name but it does not show which agent is on which extension.  This is a major headache since we have 70+ agents and not knowing who is where and when is a show stopper.  This also does not show any information as to which queue(s) the Agent is serving.

Below the Agents listed by name but in the same table, I then get a listing by extension.  The listing by extension correctly shows which queues each extension is serving, and correctly shows its status [available, busy, paused].  This section also correctly shows information like when the login took place and last call etc...its just all by extension.

Agent logins/logout show up fine as do Agents pauses/unpauses. 


What have I missed here?

[QueueMetrics]

You should add SIP devices to the queues, not Local channels (if you want to use hotdesking).

[grebnell]

That does indeed fix everything [almost].  Thank you.

I have one remaining issue: I have some remote agents using IAX2 based extensions that work better under their particular circumstances [which was why we had gone to use Local/XXXX@context rather than SIP/XXXX in the first place].  Is there any way that the hot desking on QM can be modified in the future to work using anything other than just SIP/XXXX ? 

It seems that from QM's point of view all that is really happening is data manipulation to substitute agent data for phone extension data in the log reading process. There is nothing inherent in asterisk that says "thou shall use SIP for hotdesking".  As long as the extension designator in the AddQueueMember statement in the dial plan matches the rewrite process in QM's report generator, it seems to me that this should be viable using IAX2/XXXX or even Local/XXXX@<context>/n.

Could this not be placed in the configuration properties e.g. something like:

callfile.agentaddmember_ht.extension_format=SIP/$EXT   [options: Local/$EXT@<context>, IAX2/$EXT]

This would help those of us who are hot desking with mixed protocol environments

[QueueMetrics]

Yes it's so - basically is a this-for-that match. So it's not based on SIP - we suggest SIP because Local channels had some issues, but you choose.