COMPLETE - Agent IM Chat functionality

[mflorell]

Started from this thread:
viewtopic.php?t=549

Goals:
1. Managers send broadcast messages to agents by campaign/in-group/user/user-group
2. Agents send messages to managers and other agents
3. Restrictions by user group on who can message whom
4. Logging of all messages on the system
5. Ability to take web-site based messages from customers as calls within the ViciDial agent screen
6. Interface is entirely web-based and will work through established APIs

Development Stages:
1. Admin interface to view conversations in progress on the system
2. Admin changes to user groups and user details to allow restrictions on messaging
3. Agent screen changes to allow messages to be displayed and different levels of alerts
4. Admin and agent interface to view multiple live conversations at once

Limitations:
1. No multi-user conversations(only 2 users for each conversation, broadcasting manager to group will work though)
2. No interface to other IM protocols(Jabber, AIM, MSNM, YahooMessenger, ICQ, etc...)

Cost:
Estimated 50 hours ($10,000)

UPDATE (2015-12-13):
Development is complete and committed to svn/trunk
http://vicidial.org/docs/CHAT_MESSAGING.txt

[Trying]

$100 from me.

[gmcust3]

Just a quick OT ,

Can I insert an AUTO REFRESH script at the bottom of the page which gets data from DB ? Interface can show last 5 message sent by ADMIN.

No Agent to Agent messaging else agent wil keep chatting with themselves and WONT take calls.

[vasix]

Hi Matt

I am very interested about this feature.
Can you please make a quotation for inbound emails also?
I want to know if 7200$ for chat is still available as offer and how much more is needed for email support also.
For chat you estimated around 40 hours of coding, can you please spread them by working days? I suppose you will not work 8 hours per day on this project...
Last, if we sponsor this project I want to know if it is possible to add a "sponsored by" logo for this feature or to keep it private otherwise.

Best regards,
Vasix

[mflorell]

$7100 is still needed before work can start on IM chat. As for email, you would need to provide a full list of features that you would expect to be in the new feature before I could quote hours.

[Trying]

Why would you want to keep it private? When I sponsor features or have them developed by somebody else I make sure it is made available to everyone. Isn't that the spirit of open source? The community pull together to make the project better. Just my two cents.

[williamconley]

When it's your money, you call the shots. If your competition uses Vicidial and so do you, do you REALLY want to pay $7k to improve the software for your competition? Doesn't sound fair to me.

[mflorell]

We do not put "sponsored by" logos in ViciDial. Any quotes assume full code release through the AGPLv2 license. If you want locked code we triple the price. If it is a truly custom solution that holds no value to the project, or requires security integration we will not charge triple for the development and we will not release the code.

[pborm]

Hi there, is this still available to do? My firm would be interested in paying the $7,200 or so to get the instant messaging and chat feature going...

[mflorell]

Please contact sales@vicidial.com to move forward with this.

[gmcust3]

I guess GoautoDial has got this Chat feature ?

May be I am wrong.. But I saw a folder as Chat but No idea whether its active or not.

[mflorell]

It's a separate application, not tied into vicidial like this project is designed to be.

[Trying]

Please let me know when you start with the project Matt so that I can pay my promised $100

[dspaan]

We currently use a chat program for communication between agents and supervisors. I would recommend implementing a limitation so agents cannot chat with each other by default. Our experience is that this results in a chat party

[Trying]

I think Matt is planning for that:

3. Restrictions by user group on who can message whom

[Trying]

I remember somebody committed to pay for the IM feature. Did that ever happen?

[mflorell]

No, nobody has committed to fully fund IM development.

[williamconley]

There have been several third parties that have claimed to be adding it or partially added it to older versions ... but nothing on the "official channel" and no apparent successes.

[Trying]

I will sponsor $1 000 in total. Come on the rest of you! Contribute towards this awesome feature!

[Acidshock]

This seems a bit like reinventing the wheel. Why not use an OpenFire server and one of the many web based IM packages out there like jwchat and embed it into an iframe or launch a new window? OpenFire provides a real nice admin interface and user monitoring. It can restrict protocols, etc.

[mflorell]

Integrating group controls, user permissions and logging into Vicidial with those existing packages would actually be a bigger job than just writing the functions into Vicidial, I've looked into that already.

[bghayad]

How much now "the needed money" it is remaining to get this feature working?

Regards
Bilal

[mflorell]

Looks like $6200 more is needed before we can start work.

[Acidshock]

I was thinking rather than full integration just implement it in a similar fashion of the web phones

[mflorell]

That would certainly be quicker on the development side, but would cause separate administration with no integrated logins or logging of IMs, which is a big down side, especially for larger call centers.

[bghayad]

I guess GoautoDial has got this Chat feature ?

May be I am wrong.. But I saw a folder as Chat but No idea whether its active or not.

* What is the name of it at goautodial? Where did u see it?

Regards
Bilal

[sunnyfun1987]

Pls send me the code of this project

[Trying]

LOL! This is a bounty project. Meaning that people need to contribute the money to get it done. If you contribute the outstanding amount I am sure Matt would be happy to do the project and send you the code. Well actually the code would then be on SVN so you can simply just download it.

[adam.greenhalgh1]

Hi there,

Is there any information regarding this feature ?? Last post was last year

Dont get me wrong it was only a few month ago the last message was sent...but Im really interested in this!

[Trying]

I am the only one willing to sponsor part of the development. Until more people contribute towards the $7 200 do not expect any news.

[williamconley]

There is another thread from someone who has posted an image of a chat in an agent window. No code there, either, but he may be willing to share. And we have two clients who has "almost" paid for it. LOL

[mflorell]

We've had about a half-dozen clients that have "almost" paid for it too.

After we complete some PHP cleanup(changing ereg to preg, changing mysql to mysqli), and branching of the 2.6 branch, this is probably the next large unfunded project that we will be working on. If everything keeps going the way it is, we will begin working on this in the summer.

[Trying]

NICE!!

[bghayad]

Will it has the ability to integrate with the social media (facebook, twitter, .. etc)?

Another thing, what about emails collaboration? Ability to queue and route emails for agents who are logged in, in this case the agent can handle the chats and the emails and the calls (but with the ability to have settings to control this).

Is it possible to include this? Because emails and chats are related to each other, and the agent should have a single consol to login and handle all of this with the voice calls.

Great efforts and thanks alot.
Regards
Bilal

[mflorell]

We were not planning any integration with social media, but if someone wanted to sponsor that or contribute that we would consider it.

Yes, agents would be able to handle any combination of calls, emails and IMs just as different in-groups and email groups are handled now.

[Trying]

And Vicidial continues down the path of becoming one of the very best out there!

[williamconley]

Wait a minute, "one of"? Did I miss something? As far as I can see, there's nobody else on top of this mountain.

[Nefariousparity]

What is the status on Chat in ViciBOX?

[mflorell]

We are finishing with another major project at the moment, but hopefully we will be able to start work on IM/chat in the next couple months.

[dspaan]

I've been looking for a chat solution to work alongside with ViCiDial and the best i could find is Openfire + Candy Chat.

http://candy-chat.github.io/candy/

I think Openfire is a no brainer but the reason i thought Candy Chat was the best web based client app:

-No other web based XMPP clients available right now that are still being supported
-It has editable notification sounds so an agent won't miss a chat
-You can use font colors and emoticons

One really big concern would be to disallow agents to chat with each other, i did not figure out how to do that with Openfire yet. We've done experiments with this in the past before and letting agents chat with each other negatively impacts performance. It's too much of a distraction. But i suppose it depends a lot on what kind of projects you are doing and the maturity of the agents.

Anyway i'm looking forward to chat being a integral part of vicidial. I noticed this will be an unfunded project. How much $$$ would be needed to give this some more priority?