Have you ever wanted to run a QueueMetrics wallboard within the agent page, so that even agents working from home can benefit from it? Or, have you ever wanted to display a wallboard on an existing smart TV, just to discover that its browser is too old to work well with current web standards?

This new tutorial will teach you how to easily display your wallboards in your QueueMetrics’ agent page or smart TV.

QueueMetrics

QueueMetrics is a highly scalable monitoring software that lets you track agent productivity, payrolls, measure targets, conversion rates, ACD, IVR, Music on hold, generate outbound campaign statistics and monitor realtime processes with customizable wallboards.

You can measure all contact centre activities with more than 200 different metrics and manage realtime processes with extensions and calls control, live alarms, whisper mode, spy, barge mode and a dedicated agent page.

The Wallboard Cache

If you think about it, for most users a wallboard is just something they see, so in a sense it is just a picture. What if a wallboard was just a picture, and it was just rotated every once in a while?

To make this happen, we need a bridge: a way to render an existing wallboard into a series of screenshots and to present them to your users.
This bridge is a piece of software called WallboardCache that runs a browser in the background and, quite literally, takes screenshots of its screen. You supply it with the URL of the wallboard you want to use, that in itself contains all the information needed to render it and there it goes.

So you start with a local server, and make sure that Docker is installed on it. Any operating system will do as the Docker image already contains all the software that is needed.
At this point go to your QueueMetrics server, select the wallboard you want to share, click on the little heart icon and you will have its URL in your clipboard. Paste it somewhere, replace the three stars that appear in the password field with the correct password and note the resulting URL.

Now go to your server and run:

docker run -e \
"URL=https://us.queuemetrics-live.com:443/unk/qm_wab2.do?user=robot&pass=123&queues=500&wallboardId=17" \
-p 3000:3000  -d loway/wbcache

And, in a browser, e.g. on your smart TV, go to the URL http://my.server:3000/?wb=wb.

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There you are! a complete wallboard running in your smart TV! (or old mobile phone, or smart fridge… anywhere some old browser is available).

As an interesting side effect, as this is just one browser producing a set of pictures, you can have as many clients as you need looking at the same pictures, and the resulting load on the QueueMetrics server is very low.

Integrating with the agent page

Once the page is visible, you just need one more small step to tell your QueueMetrics server to display the wallboard on the Agent’s page in an inner resizable panel. Go to your QueueMetrics server, edit the configuration and add the following two lines:

realtime.agent_webpanel1_url=http://my.server:3000/?wb=wb&agent=[a]
realtime.agent_webpanel1_label=My wallboard  

Now all your agents will have a new panel called “My Wallboard” that displays the wallboard in (almost) real-time. You can move it around and you can resize it as you best see fit.

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Wrapping up

If you want to modify the wallboard, you can just shut down the Docker process and start it again. Interestingly, even when the image crashes or is not available, client try to reload it, so when it becomes available again, it just appears where it is supposed to be.
For the same reason, you can safely restart the bridge at any time.

More details on the project are available at: github.com/Loway

QueueMetrics References

QueueMetrics software is available on premise or as a cloud hosted service for FreePBX, Yeastar S PBX, Grandstream, Issabel, FusionPBX and many other Asterisk distros.

For more technical information please refer to the User Manual.

Visit www.queuemetrics.com for a free 30 days full featured trial.

Attend our Free Webinars for a live demonstration of QueueMetrics.

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