If your account subscription provides Enterprise Integration, you may easily extend the capabilities of the Velaro Desktop Application through the use of our "Application Integration" feature. By implementing application integration, you can automatically add new tabs to the Velaro Desktop application that link to custom web sites, and pass dynamic information to those application's via the URL.
The most popular use of Application Integration is when your website visitors are logged in to web applications in which you want to display extended information provided by that application to your agents. For example, if your customer's are logged in to your e-commerce website, you may want to display to your agents all the items that they have committed to their shopping cart.
Step 1: Create a custom application web page
The web application that you want to integrate in to Velaro must have a URL that is accessible from your agent's desktop computers. Often, this URL points to an internal server that is not accessible to the public. This web page typically requires a number of custom URL parameters in the querystring to be able to uniquely identify the visitor.
For example, you may have a web page that accepts a visitor's session ID which was created by your e-commerce application. This page may display a list of items currently stored in this visitors shopping cart. An example of this URL may be:
https://store.internalserver/shoppingcart.php?visitorId=qwerty12345
Step 2: Implement custom visitor monitoring
Use the following URL to implement custom visitor monitoring on your web site:
http://www.velaro.com/kb/KnowledgebaseArticle10047.aspx
This article explains how you can set up Velaro's visitor monitoring to pass custom information about the visitor in to the Velaro system.
When implementing an application integration, you will want to make sure that you pass any information into Velaro that will be needed to identify or successfully access the proper information in your custom application. In most cases, this will require that your web site has the ability to DYNAMICALLY create and modify the Velaro visitor monitoring script that is delivered to the website visitor's browser.
Continuing the example from step 1, your website would need to dynamically create the following visitor monitoring script:
<script>
var rm = escape(window.document.referrer.replace("&","*"));
var pm = window.document.URL.replace("&","*");
var sm = 'http://srv0.velaro.com/visitor/monitor.aspx?siteid=1&autorefresh=yes&vid=gretpojlk234&origin=';
sm=sm rm '&pa=' pm '"></scr' 'ipt>';
document.write('<script src="' sm);
</script>
In the above example, you web site dynamically inserts the "vid=gretpojlk234" in to the Velaro visitor monitoring script. Notice that the parameter name "vid" does not necessarily have to be the same parameter name required by your custom application ("visitorId" in the above example).
Step 3: Configure your new Application Tab
Once you have set up and deployed your scripts, you now need to configure Velaro to create your new tab. To do this, follow these steps:
1. Log in to the Velaro Control Panel at http://login.velaro.com as an administrator 2. Select Account > Integration 3. Select "Application Integration" from the menu on the left 4. Click the plus ( ) sign to create a new application tab. 5. Fill in the new form based on the following information:
Department - If you want the new application tab to show up only when visitor's are in a specific department, select that department from the "Working On" list of available departments. If you want the application tab to be available for all visitors, keep the value set to "None".
Tab name – Enter the text that is displayed on the actual tab within the Velaro desktop application. This should be a recognizable name to your agent.
Application name – A unique identifier for this application. The value of this field must be unique for every entry you create within the Application Integration list. By using the application name field and the tab name field in conjunction with each other, you have the ability to have multiple tabs with the same name (perhaps shown at different times depending on which department the visitor is currently navigating).
URL – Enter the URL used to access your custom application. You can pass any dynamic information required by your custom application as long as the parameter has been placed in to your visitor monitoring script. To pass custom parameters, use the following example syntax:
https://store.internalserver/shoppingcart.php?visitorId=##vid##
The above example builds off the previous steps. Since the visitor monitoring script (from step 2) is passing the custom parameter using “vid” as the identifier, we must now insert a macro which tells Velaro to replace that parameter with the actual value.
Close tab when not displayed – Select this option to tell the Velaro Desktop Application to shut down the tab (and embedded web browser) when the agent navigates away from this visitor. If this option is selected, the page will have to be reloaded every time the agent re-navigates to that visitor.
After the above steps are complete, whenever an agent selects a visitor from the Velaro Desktop Application, a new tab will be displayed. When the agent selects that tab, an embedded web browser will navigate the agent to the custom application URL.
In the above example, the desktop application will navigate the agent to this URL:
https://store.internalserver/shoppingcart.php?visitorId=gretpojlk234