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haiduzhaiduz 

CTI: Support for call intergration

Has anyone had any success with CTI (Computer Telephony Integration). If would be extremely beneficial to users to have call center features such as bringing up a contact from a phone call. However, reading the Skype App reviews it seems that it is only for opportunities and got a fully developed solution. Another option I found is this:
 
 
However, the .de url and the fact that I could not find a mention of mirage of the salesforce appexchange very sceptical.
 
Please let me know of my option regarding CTI.
DevAngelDevAngel
This is more of a CTI excercise than a salesforce integration exercise.  Simply put, most vendors support a TSP for windows (TSP = TAPI Service Provider).  When you install a TSP from you switch vendor, you can now use TAPI to write programs that will be informed of telephony events and be able to pass telephone commands to the switch. 

Once you are able to be notified of a inbound call event you can use the caller id number to do a simple search in salesforce.  If you get a single search result, then it is just a matter of programatically opening a browser using the id of the object returned from search in the salesforce url (search the forums for frontdoor.jsp to see what the url should look like).

For outbound calling, calling by clicking a link on a salesforce.com page, you need to have a http server running on the desktop for the link to pass the phone number to.  You little http server will parse the request url and obtain the number to dial, and then ask the switch to dial the number via TAPI.

Since each vendor has a differenct TAPI implementation, it is difficult to provide a generic solution for everyone.

The mirage solution would be interesting to try.  I would not let the .de url alone discourage you, but the lack of partner certification or partner status should be considered.

Cheers
haiduzhaiduz

Thanks for your reply, I  think the mirage solution is not going to work because of them not being recongnized by salesforce. I am just a little annoyed because on the this site:

http://www.salesforce.com/products/customer-service.jsp 

CTI ingertation is mentioned as one of the features of salesforce, however, I have seen very little support.

ummagummaummagumma
As Dev Angel said it's got everything to do with the telephony vendor. We integrated outbound dialing between our soft PBX and salesforce.com instance over the course of a week with a single developer.
 
What exactly are you looking for?
ramsubramanianramsubramanian

Hi,

how did you achieve that piece of integration b/w the pbx - salesforce.com?

Did the cti team have to provide you with a wsdl file for you to implement your webservices?

how did you get around with the http server that devangel was talking about?did you have to install the server & then parse the request?

your help is greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

ram

werewolfwerewolf
Salesforce's new Call Center Edition product, going into pilot as part of the Winter '07 Release, will make CTI Integration much simpler.  We've lined up a number of partners who will support nearly every conceivable telephony platform, including Cisco, Avaya, Aspect, Genesys, Alcatel, Skype, and many others too numerous to list here.  If you'd like to be part of the Call Center Edition pilot in Winter '07, please contact your customer success manager or account executive, and they can set you up.

With respect to the functionality provided in Call Center Edition, the two main pillars are screen pops and click-to-dial. First, we can screen pop either on the incoming caller ID. We actually divide screen pop into two parts: the "mini-pop" and the "full pop." If the caller ID matches multiple records, we'll do a mini-pop, into the sidebar only, showing the names of those records which matched. If there's a unique search result, we'll do a full pop, bringing that one record up front and center. We can also screen pop based on IVR or other such call attached data, rather than on the caller ID.

There is also the notion of click-to-dial. When an adapter is present and logged in, all the phone numbers in the app become clickable links which will dial out to that number when clicked.

Call Center Edition has a built-in notion of call logging, whereby a log is created for every call and associated to the relevant objects automatically. Logs are created in Salesforce.com as closed activities, so the calls will be immediately visible in the relevant objects in their Activity History lists.
Rutger KarsRutger Kars
Hi Werewolf,
 
do you have any information about this new CTI integration? As I'm investigating the possibilities to integrate SalesForce with a callcenter application.
 
I could find anything about it on the homepage or on the help sites.
werewolfwerewolf
Hello Rutger,

We will update the website with the release of Winter '07 to reflect our new Call Center Edition product.

For Call Center Edition, we have lined up numerous partners to provide prebuilt support for over 70 different platforms, including Cisco, Avaya, Alcatel, Aspect, and many more, both on-premise and on-demand telephony.

We are also providing a developer's toolkit, called the CTI Toolkit, to make it easy to integrate a new telephony platform to Salesforce.com.

To integrate a currently supported telephony platform with Salesforce.com, you need only obtain the proper CTI Adapter from one of our partners who supports your platform.  If you're a Salesforce.com customer (or you'd like to become one) and you'd like to find out whether your telephony platform has a prebuilt adapter, call your Salesforce.com Account Executive.

Once you have the adapter for your telephony system, setup is a snap.  This administrator tip sheet and this end user tip sheet will give you a pretty good idea of how it's done.

If your company sells telephony applications and you'd like to integrate your company's products with Salesforce.com, the CTI Toolkit Developer's Guide will give you an idea of what's required to integrate a new platform.  If you would like to enroll your company in Salesforce.com's CTI partner program, please dial 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE (1-800-667-6389) and ask for Herve Danzelaud; he manages alliances for Call Center Edition, and he will get you started.

I, by the way, am Marco Casalaina, I am the product manager for Call Center Edition, and if you have questions about Call Center Edition, you're also welcome to contact me.

-Werewolf
werewolfwerewolf
For a visual on what Call Center Edition looks like, check out the screenshots here:

http://blogs.salesforce.com/features/2006/12/call_center_edi.html

Message Edited by werewolf on 12-12-2006 05:50 PM

PuzzledPuzzled
I give up.  I've been looking for the demo CTI connector that's supposed to be in the CTI Toolkit but I can't find the CTI toolkit.  Every link I've followed in the CTI documentation that says where to get it takes me somewhere that doesn't have it.

I used to have a file called "demo_RC4_setup.exe" that was a demo connector but I lost it.  How do I get another copy of it or the CTI toolkit?

Message Edited by Puzzled on 02-23-2007 06:58 PM

DevAngelDevAngel
This is an excellent question.  We are obviously missing something on the ADN site.  I've contacted the Product Manager for the CTI connector and asked him to respond to your post.  Please be patient since it's 8:20 PM PST on a Friday! 

Cheers
werewolfwerewolf
Puzzled,

The demo adapter, like Call Center Edition itself, is in limited release.  Please shoot an email or give a ring to Marco Casalaina at Salesforce.com (the email is his first initial and full last name @salesforce.com, you can call him via 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE), he's the product manager for Call Center Edition, and he can set you up with these limited release items.
PuzzledPuzzled
Thanks for the responses.  I have a customer who started with the Call Center Edition last week and I need to be able to support them offsite.

I do have another question.  From my previous tests of Call Center and the demo adapter it appeared that there is some javascript that is initiated by clicking the phone number which brings up the call logging window.  I hesitate to call it the Activity window since it was merely the comments field.  We have created custom fields that need to be filled in during each of their calls.

I don't see any configuration ability allowing more fields from the Activity record to be made available during a call initiated via the link.  Is there a way?  If not, is it possible to modify the dialing javascript to bring up a regular new Activity instead of just that comments window?  We don't care if it's not on the side panel.
XifierXifier
Puzzler,

Although Javascript is in the equation, the bulk of the work in a click to dial scenario is done in the adapter, a client side piece of software written in C++.  In this release, it is not possible to add more fields to the call log, although that is on the roadmap for the following release.

If you do need to fill more fields of Activity, you can do that by modifying the adapter code itself.  Please contact Marco Casalaina, the CTI product manager, next week to discuss it -- sometimes people are looking to do things like call dispositioning, which the adapter usually will do out of the box, but which seems to be a oft-overlooked function of it.
PuzzledPuzzled
Yes, I was afraid of that because I couldn't find any kind of custom link with the code in their setup.

Thanks for clearing this up!  I hope Cisco will be cooperative about allowing changes to their adapter.
GvCrKlrNanoRbotGvCrKlrNanoRbot
I've been able to get the CISCO CTI adapter to work, but I've run into a few problems:

1.  All calls made through the adapter are being logged into Salesforce.  Users want to be able to disable the Softphone for calls that they do not want to have logged into Salesforce (i.e. personal calls).  I can't seem to find ANYWHERE in the settings where it allows any kind of Options or Preferences to be defined for logging calls.

2.  I can't find where Salesforce determines what is and isn't considered to be a long distance call.  I appears that I takes ANY and ALL 10-digit phone numbers and considers them to be long distance.  As a result, we're getting long distance charges for local calls made through the CTI adapter as it is adding a 1 before all 10-digit phone numbers.  The only fix we've been able to come up with is to remove the setting of placing a 1 in front of all long-distance calls and add "(1)" in front of every single long distance phone number in our system.  This is an extremely large undertaking with almost 90,000 contacts in the system from around the globe.  Any idea of how to resolve this issue of Salesforce considering all 10-digit phone numbers to be long distance?

3.  The CTI softphone does not appear in the left side-bar when I log into salesforce using mozilla/Firefox.  It only shows up by logging into Salesforce using Internet Explorer...any ideas as to what could be blocking this from mozilla/firefox?
HardhatHardhat

1.  All calls made through the adapter are being logged into Salesforce.  Users want to be able to disable the Softphone for calls that they do not want to have logged into Salesforce (i.e. personal calls).  I can't seem to find ANYWHERE in the settings where it allows any kind of Options or Preferences to be defined for logging calls.

There is not an option or preference to do this.  How would the adapter know what's a personal call and what's not?


2.  I can't find where Salesforce determines what is and isn't considered to be a long distance call.  I appears that I takes ANY and ALL 10-digit phone numbers and considers them to be long distance.  As a result, we're getting long distance charges for local calls made through the CTI adapter as it is adding a 1 before all 10-digit phone numbers.  The only fix we've been able to come up with is to remove the setting of placing a 1 in front of all long-distance calls and add "(1)" in front of every single long distance phone number in our system.  This is an extremely large undertaking with almost 90,000 contacts in the system from around the globe.  Any idea of how to resolve this issue of Salesforce considering all 10-digit phone numbers to be long distance?

You can change your CallManager dial plan to strip your local area code off the number if it sees one.


3.  The CTI softphone does not appear in the left side-bar when I log into salesforce using mozilla/Firefox.  It only shows up by logging into Salesforce using Internet Explorer...any ideas as to what could be blocking this from mozilla/firefox?

The CTI toolkit does not yet support Firefox, only IE 6 and up.

werewolfwerewolf
The CTI Toolkit can be found here:

http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/CTI_Toolkit

You'll find the demo adapter there too.
Rahul Mishra 155Rahul Mishra 155

Still looking for a connector option? Try out the Smart CTI Connector from NovelVox. Connecting Salesforce with a telephony system becomes easy when you have a reliable CTI connector by your side. The integration not only activates the telephony functionalities inside the CRM environment but also enables workflow automation for agents, such as screen popping a contact page on receiving calls from a new or existing customer. 

Get more details from here: https://www.novelvox.com/cti-connector/salesforce/

Hope this helps!!