We are proud to announce that Queuemetrics 1.4.5 has been released. This version improves Queuemetrics support for foreign languages and offers a mitigation for one of the most important problems call-centers administrators were facing, i.e. incorrect statistics for calls with missing records that would seem to go on forever. One other thing that was heavily improved is the new pure-dialplan outbound calling script, that offers better logging and requires no AGI overhead.
As always, we value your feedback on how to improve QueueMetrics to make it a better fit to your needs.
New features New features:
- New pure-scripting solution is used instead of the old queueDial.agi script, thus solving a number of issues (#121, #220, #229)
- This version of QM may work with queueDial.agi, but the new script is needed for realtime outbound monitoring (#401)
- Updated documentation for outbound - see the version 2.0 of 'Tracing outbound calls through QueueMetrics in TrixBox' (#394)
- The EULA for QM must be approved on startup. If an incorrect version of the DB is detected, QM will not open and will show the "updating" page. (#374, #228)
- It is possible to force-close an ongoing call (see the user manual) (#399).
- An external auth source can be used for authentication. (#406)
- All audio files saved by Asterisk are now streamed correctly (you still need the correct codecs on the client machine though) (#427)
- New translations: Russian (#407), Spanish, Dutch (#430)
- Improved French translation (#410)
- New AEL dialplan example (#417)
Bugs fixed over the previous releases - Bug #367: the agent filter would sometimes not work.
- Bug #240: some encoding problems with the French charset.
- Bug #389: English appeared twice in the language selection combo in 1.4.4, and the first instance was not working.
- Bug #391: In QA, the "score" was computed instead of the "average". Also the loader would sometimes crash on invalid data being fed.
- Bug #403: QM would go over and over to the DBTOOL page.
- Bug #262: Incomplete entities would not be closed when running in "cluster:" mode.
- Bug #414: "No filter" and "Passthrough" are now logged the same way.
- Bug #413: The "insert record" dialog would crash on some MySQL systems.
- Bug #426. The TrixBox 2.6 tutorial had a small mistake when showing agents.
The new outbound script Nobody liked the old queueDial.agi script. Yes, it did the job, but it has always been quite complex to set up for first-time users. Also, its event logging was incorrect, so that the "connect" event of the outbound call was not seen correctly on the realtime page. As a last downside, it required forking a new process for each new call, so it posed scalability problems for the largest call centers.
Since version 1.4.5 of QueueMetrics (and if you run Asterisk 1.4), it is now possible to use a full-dialplan solution for outbound calling. It can be found in the extensions_queuemetrics.conf files under WEB-INF/mysql-utils/extensions-examples. By looking at it, you can see that the [queudial] or [queuedial-loggedon] contexts can be very easily changed to suit your needs, and there is no need to change the main outbound calling procedure.
A new tutorial has been created to show how to set up this new scripting solution with the ubiquitous TrixBox - you will find it here: TrixBox Outgoing 2.0.
New languages Since release 1.4.5, QueueMetrics is also natively available in Russian and Dutch. A new Spanish translation has been added to better suit the taste of European users, and the French translation has been extensively revised.
If your native language is not supported yet - why not translating QueueMetrics? it just takes a couple of hours and it's very easy to do - see the Translator's guide.
Closing incorrect ongoing calls It sometimes happens: Asterisk forgets to log some call-closure events. This leads to calls that seem to go on forever in the real-time log, and end up spoiling the averages of your historical stats.
Since version 1.4.5 (and if you are running with a SQL backend - but if you don't use it yet, you really should) it is possible for call-center administrators to force the closure of such anomalous calls so that they will go away from the real-time screen and will still appear in the reports but with a length that does not ruin your daily averages. Calls can be closed from both the historical and the real-time view.
This feature is of-course protected from a security key and must be manually enabled. In order to set this up, please download the latest version of the User manual - see section "Closing ongoing calls" on page 135.
How to upgrade from a previous version If you installed originally using yum, you should simply type:
yum update queuemetrics
and then point your browser to
http://myserver:8080/queuemetrics/dbtest to update the database.
You should then copy the web.xml and configuration.properties from the old release to the new one.
Do not forget to make a backup copy of the database before running the update (just in case...)
