Introduction

CTIOS brings several major advances to developing custom CTI integration solutions. The CTIOS Client Interface Library (CIL) provides an object-oriented and event driven application programming interface (API), while the CTIOS server does all the `heavy-lifting' of the CTI integration: updating call context information, determining which buttons to enable on softphones, providing easy access to supervisor features (for IPCC), and automatically recovering from fail-over scenarios.

CTIOS Benefits

• Rapid integration.Developing CTI applications with CTIOS is significantly easier and faster than any previously-available Cisco CTI integration platform. The same object oriented interface is used across programming languages, enabling rapid integrations in .NET, C++, Visual Basic, Java, or any Microsoft COM compliant container environment. CTIOS enables developers to create a screen pop application in as little as five minutes. With CTIOS, the CTI portion of your application is complete out-of-the-box; the only custom-development effort required is within the home-grown application to which CTI is being added.
• Complex solutions made simple.CTIOS enables complex server-to-server integrations and multiple agent monitoring-type (including supervisor for IPCC) applications. The CIL provides a single object-oriented interface that can be used by both agent-mode and monitor-mode connections
• Centralized Configuration.With CTIOS, customizing the appearance of the agent softphone and supervisor softphone (for IPCC) is distributed by the server. Once the configuration has been updated in the server, all clients will receive it the next time they restart the application and connect.
• Fault tolerant. CTIOS is built upon the ICM NodeManager fault-tolerant platform, which automatically detects process failure and restarts the process. Upon recovery from a failure, CTIOS initiates a complete, system-wide snapshot of all agents, calls, and supervisors and propagates updates to all client-side objects.

Technology/Solution Details

The workflow of a modern contact center is based on two main areas: the media for communicating with the customer and the platform for servicing customer requests. CTI is the integration of the communications media (that is, phone, e-mail, or Web) with the customer service platform (that is, customer databases, transaction processing systems, or CRM (customer relationship management) software packages). Integrating communications media with the customer service platform helps agents to service customers better and faster in two ways. First, it enables the agent to leverage the information and events provided by the media to direct his workflow. Second, it increases the depth and breadth of customer information presented to the agent when the customer's contact arrives at the workstation.