Cisco Networkers 2006 [Contact Center Reporting] Part 3 of ??
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Reporting.
First, fix the naming of all of these products. Unified this, express, that. It’s still all too confusing. Holy shiznit.
I attended this session today because we have reporting needs and to be blunt, CAR and Cisco Historical Reporting are a heaping pile of pooh.
Sure they give you some nifty reports out of the box, but chances that they are the reports you need are almost nil. Customizing those reports is a royal pain in the nether region.
I attended this session today because I wanted to see what Cisco had in store for us. Just what they were working on to make our lives easier. If all of what Mr. Chambers had talked about in his Key note is just around the corner, then by golly, there’s going to be some serious reporting needs on the back end.
To give you a little background. Cisco IPCCX and Call Manager, and I know those may not be the “Proper” names these days but that’s what I’m sticking with for now. Have used some form of bundled/canned crystal for a while. Version 8.5 and in 4.x you get to use 10.
But it’s still too awkward and cumbersome to customize to get the reports you need.
Can it be done? Sure. Heck they are kind enough to give you the database schema. What more could you ask for?
I tell you what I can ask for, something user friendly along with a process that isn’t 72 steps long. You shouldn’t have to write a stored procedure for basic reports. Nope, that shouldn’t be necessary.
I happened to show up to this class a little early and took the opportunity to preview the slide handouts. I could see that the bulk of the material was about customizing these Crystal reports. Ugh.
When we first installed our Cisco Phone system, let it run for a couple weeks and ran a few reports, some of our people didn’t even show up in the ‘canned’ reports. Yes, you read that right, a big WTF?
So we dipped into the database and took a look. The data was there. So we wrote our own.
At the time we were evaluating Business Objects. Don’t get me started on them. We couldn’t even buy that product or get pricing when we had money in hand to spend. So we did the next best thing. We looked at what else was out there. To that end we stumbled upon Microsoft SQL 2k5 Reporting services.
Within a day or two we had the reports we wanted, on the web, for any one of the mangers to run ad-hoc as needed. Guess what? The could print them, export them to Excel, and even subscribe to them and have them emailed. Something that even today Cisco says is on the feature list.
Before the lecture, I asked the two Cisco folks if they had given Reporting services a look. They asked what I was referring too and what it was about. I explained it comes with Microsoft SQL Server 2k5.
They said; “Oh,no, Our road map is to move away from Microsoft products towards *nix, so we wouldn’t look down that path. Well excuse me. But you still have a windows based product and damnit you ship SQL server so update that to 2005 and you’re problems go away.
But I let it go.
As I sat through the program, I watched in awe as I saw NO improvement to the customization process over the way it was a year ago. It’s still too damn complicated. It shouldn’t be this hard. It is NOT user friendly and doesn’t promote innovation or data mining.
I hung around afterwards to show them what we have done using SQL Reporting Services and managed to show a few of them. They appeared to be impressed. No templates, no stored procedures, no command line updates, nothing hard. All easy and much nicer than the current crazy ness that’s being shipped today, then it was like I was invisible. All of a sudden nobody was talking to me except someone from support. I gave him my business card in case they wanted to discuss it, but I don’t think he grasped the scope of things.
There is a lot broken in the Cisco administration and user experience. Reporting is only one part of it. But it’s a big part.
There is a huge opportunity for a 3rd party to step up. I know some have already, but even they seem to make it harder than it is.
During the session we talked about things like Outbound Call modules, and Email Queuing and reporting. Things that will be in the 5.x train (the *nix flavor) and will be merged with the 6.x train (the Windows flavor) but that won’t happen until end of year 2007. If they are saying that NOW, then they still have a relationship with Microsoft and Reporting Services should be a part of that.
By end of calendar year 2007 reporting services will be huge. Now, don’t mistake me for a Microsoft advocate. They certainly screw up more than their fair share, but this is one product that is really right.
C’mon Cisco make something easy and fun to work with would ya?
Written by datapoohbah on June 20th, 2006 with no comments.
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