Hi folks,
Sorry about the confusion! Conference Mode wasn't working for some folks because our documentation instructed you to use the Practice queue to initiate it, when in fact you need to use the real BC Acad queue, otherwise the Conference 4 All question won't show up in the real queue that everyone is staffing. The documentation has been revised:
Instructions for using Conference Mode to chat with all AskAwayers online.
Happy conferencing!
- Sunni
BC ELN
Communicate quickly with all of the librarians currently online!
When beginning your next shift at Askaway, be sure to join the conference (or be the first to set one up)! This allows you to communicate quickly with all of the librarians who are currently online.
Use conference mode to find out who's online, to co-ordinate transfers at shift changes, or announce important discoveries.
For example:
As some of you have already noted, the Chat Monitor now has a new feature, the All tab.
The All tab lists ongoing questions that other librarians are answering. If you click on one of these questions, you will enter "Conference Mode", where you jump into the conversation already occurring between the student and the librarian who picked up the question from the queue.
This "All" tab is right beside the "My Active" tab, which lists all of the questions that you have picked up from the queue, so please be careful not to confuse the two!
Hi folks.
Happy New Year! This is a quick posting about some technical tips.
1. You'll notice the various upgrades and bug-fixes which were rolled out in early December: better response time, the patron connection status indicators, etc. See my posting for more detail.
2. QuestionPoint will shortly announce that QP is compatible with IE 7. Yayyy!
Update to the message below: The upload has been delayed a week. Also, of course, our service is closed as of yesterday, so you won't get to try these features until January.
Great news! The QuestionPoint upgrade scheduled for this weekend should fix a number of minor annoyances. Here's a partial list of the fixes:
The following tip comes from the AskAway public library service ...
QuestionPoint speed tactics
Some suggestions have been made that QuestionPoint runs much faster if you don't have many Internet Explorer browser windows open. Jane Lucas (one of our Supp Staff) has found that if she runs only the Chat Monitor (and co-browse windows) in IE and then runs all of her other browser tasks from Firefox, she gets much better performance. Perhaps a few of you can try this out and let us all know if that seems to improve chat and IM response.
-Gordon
BCELN
Hi folks. The Comments feature on the blog has now been turned on.
If someone posted a question or comment to the blog, and you'd like to reply immediately (and publicly), here's what you do:
1. Click the Comments button.
2. Under "Post a Comment", hit the orange Sign in link.
3. You'll be taken to a TypeKey screen. On the left, enter the Name and Password. They are exactly the same as the name and password combo for posting entries to the blog. See my email of Nov. 14 for those.
I've had a few questions from librarians wanting to upgrade their Internet Explorer browser to version 7, which Microsoft just released. The official word from QuestionPoint is: don't upgrade yet. They're having some difficulties making cobrowse play nicely in IE7.
(Related note: apparently OCLC (which owns QuestionPoint) has banned all their employees from using IE7. A number of their products and services do not work well in IE7.)
-Gordon
BCELN
We know things are getting busy now, and you may find yourself trying to respond to more calls than you can handle. So we've added a new tool: a Swamped page. The URL has been added to the list of "scripted URLs" you can push to the user. Basically it's just the viewport page, but with a message added at the top saying that we're very busy and it may take a few minutes before their call will be answered.
Note that this is a page you push, so you do have to pick up the patron from the queue before you can send this.
