Specifications
together in a distributed environment.
Server CENTS manages and main-
tains customer connections for single
or multiple Web fronts for one or more
companies. It may also make decisions
about passing the management of spe-
cific connections that meet configured
criteria to other CENTS servers, either
within the same network or across the
Internet. Server CENTS manages and
maintains the customer connections to
the CSRs registered with it using con-
figurable criteria to make a customer-
CSR match and then initiate a cus-
tomer-CSR connection.
Workbench CENTS is the adminis-
tration tool for the entire CENTS sys-
tem. It allows the administrator to create
profiles of information regarding each
particular CSR, information pertinent to
call routing, and billing specifications.
CSR CENTS provides detailed infor-
mation to a CSR about each call as well
as whatever historical information
about a caller is available. Call tracking
and billing information is collected
automatically by CSR CENTS.
Customer CENTS is a Web site add-
on providing customer service features
across the Internet. Customers will be
able to ask for assistance from a live
agent or support personnel. The routing
of the call to the CSR can be based on
advanced call center principles such as
next-available CSR, load balancing
between CSRs and call center sites, and
skills-based routing. Customer CENTS
uses the Conferencing API to connect
the user with a CSR.
OPERATIONAL TESTING
In our tests, we combined the sys-
tem’s modules in such a way as to cre-
ate an online channel over our laborato-
ry’s Intranet. This channel would serve
to give customers access to CSRs.
Server CENTS
We set up our Server CENTS on a
Pentium 120 machine with 32 Megs of
RAM running Windows NT Server 4.0
on a standard 10-Base-T network. On this
PC, we installed Internet Information
Server 3.0 and SQL Server 6.5.
At first, we spent some time tuning
and configuring the Internet
Information Server and the SQL Server
applications. We also made sure that
our network clients could access both
of these server applications. Netscape
Navigator browser on our client con-
firmed the correct operation of the
Internet Information Server. After start-
ing the SQL Server services, we
installed the SQL Server client mod-
ules on one of our Windows 95 PCs and
were able to successfully access the
SQL Server through the SQL
Enterprise Manager on our client PC. It
is not required that the SQL server be
on the same machine as the Server
CENTS. ODBC can be employed to
provide the connection.
The installation notes for Server
CENTS were easy to follow. We
installed the Server CENTS module
using the corresponding setup program
which created a CENTS home directo-
ry on the hard disk and copied some
files into it. This program also created a
virtual directory on our Web server
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