Thursday, November 5, 2009

OpenSpan - Smarter Contact Center Desktops

Yes, that's our new theme.

OpenSpan simply makes applications you already use, or have just brought - SMARTER. You don't even have to own the app to make it smarter.

Here's some early news on what's coming very very soon.

1. I still can't tell you the number one item yet, but in a few more weeks, you will find out - but it's BIG, VERY BIG, so keep watching :)

2. If you are a Microsoft Visual Studio developer, the next release of OpenSpan runs as a VSIP plug-in for Visual Studio. If you are not a Visual Studio developer, don't worry we still have a solution for you. As part of the download, we will bring down a free version of the Visual Studio shell which then enables VSIP plug-ins like OpenSpan Studio to run. It's very cool how we have integrated the best of OpenSpan Studio with the best of Visual Studio (you can now even design your own UI forms and dashboards in Visual Studio directly and have them be part of any automation!). OpenSpan Studio is easier to use than ever so feel free to ping me and I'll give you a link to an advanced pre-beta. Remember too, if you develop in IBM's Lotus expeditor, our Studio runs inside that too as an OWC plug-in for expeditor. Oh, so many design choices now :)

3. Oh, I love this. OpenSpan is exposing all of it's adapter elements and design time components for external developers to access directly from their own code. Whilst the visual drag-and-drap workflow/design paradigm of the OpenSpan studio is loved by developers and business analysts world-wide, die-hard programmers can now write say in C#, to interact in real-time with the objects created and exposed by OpenSpan. You will be able to write your own wrappers to 3rd party applications or even write code to wrap OpenSpan automations. Properties methods and events as well as automations are fully available through our Code Dom Serialization project (the tech term for this major feature). This is big and significant for die-hard developers and OEM partners.

4. OpenSpan Events has already been released but here is what's new;

..* Fully configurable to use MS-MQ, TIBCO, JMS, IBM-MQ or Web Services as per your preference
.. * Now support's generic events as well as custom events
Generic events will enable you to log all application activity, including all objects inside that application
without any interrogation of the objects in the application. OpenSpan Events automatically finds all
visibile and invisible objects and reports anything the application or user does with those objects to the
Analytics database for any drill-down graphical reporting and dash-boarding.
Custom Events then allows you to create your own events that get logged to the analytics database, so for
example, if you want to log a start transaction like, new account, change address, mortgage application, they
will all be sent to the analytics engine for advanced analytics around user activity on the desktop.
..* New Server-Side Components for Collection, Transformation and Loading of Events Data. Supports SQL
Server and Oracle databases
..* Developer mode to enable developers who license the OpenSpan Events to interact directly and/or bypass
messaging components so you can interact with OpenSpan events in any mode you desire.

As you can see, a lot is happening here at OpenSpan and there's a lot more to come. We continue to listen to our customers and partners and excited by our world-leading position in this space. Keep watching..