I’ve had an XMPP (Jabber) instant message server at the office for a couple of years now and it’s a great little tool. Originally I installed it to get people away from 2 things.
- Using personal instant message clients that I had no control over (skype being the worst)
- A file transfer method for employees to use that was more efficient than email
Sending files thru email, sure that’s quick…kinda. If you compare creating a new email document, finding your file, attaching, entering in contact/subject/body and clicking send verses dragging and dropping the file onto the contact on your Spark app…Jabber wins. Add in the fact that our email server is hosted offsite…makes sense to use Jabber since it moves the files as fast as the source and destination machines can handle. 1000Mb/s vs 4.5Mb/s twice. No brainer there.
So all of these are great and really that’s why I installed the server and had everyone setup with clients. Then you get into the plugins. The one I am going to focus on in particular is called fastpath. Fastpath allows you to setup queues for your employees, insert a bit of code on your website and viola! You now have live chat enabled on your website. Here are some things it will do:
- Queue requests based on user input
- Multiple queues
- Canned responses allow a generic/draft to be built for all employees within a workgroup to have a standard response.
- Reporting on average hold time and time taken with a customer
- Observing features for management and transcripts of conversations
- Customer emailed transcripts of the conversation
- Automatic prescience adjusted icons depending on the status of your employees in queue (online/offline/idle) and automatic changing from online chat to sending an email to us
We went live about a week ago and I have had nothing but good responses from our employees, preferring it over email for communication with customers.
Setup for the server was simple, Ubuntu has a .deb build that installs itself. Just point your browser to the server afterwards to configure server name and users.
Plugins are simple as well. Ignite-realtime keeps an updated list embedded in the server. Just click the + sign next to the plugin you want to install, wait for it to finish and you’re set.
If you know what you’re doing and want an easy way to transfer files around…you’re still better off with FTP or just simple file sharing. But what several of us were running into at the office was trying to copy 4gb files amongst ourselves and that can take a while. This solved that and wound up being a very powerful tool.
Check out the source: http://www.ignite-realtime.org
