Half-Baked Software, a Datapoohbah Production is proud to announce:

Desktop and client side, ACD Queue monitoring and alerting.

Working Product Title: The Cisco IPCCX Unified Communications Queue Manager for IPCCX Express and Above.
Short Name: Queue Monitor

Queue Monitor is a Windows System Tray application that queries specified queues and alerts the user when:

• The number of available agents falls below a predetermined threshold.
• A caller has been on hold for longer than a specified threshold.

Example:

• This handy tool simply sits in the user’s or supervisor’s task tray and alerts them to undesirable queue conditions.
• Each alarm condition is logged in a text file for audit and review.
• No more watching the Supervisor Desktop — let Queue monitor tell you when your ACD agents are pushed past capacity.

Pricing and Licensing to be determined.

For more information contact sales@datapoohbah.com

Well, for now it’s over. I’ve used the Blackberry 8830 for a week and I just boxed it up to send back, though I have a few more days. Perhaps going back and using my Treo for a few days will help me really decide that it was better or not but so far:

Pros of this phone:

• Battery life is good.
• Bluetooth implementation is excellent unlike the Treo.
• BB Enterprise server is essentially the same as Good[tm] but has a ton more options.
• This phone has a LOT of options.
• Voice quality is good.
• It’s thinner.

Cons of this phone:

• The interface isn’t simplistic or even all that polished.
• That track ball thingy is weird. The Palm 5-way is optimized, as are Palm apps for what they do. This thing, not so much.
• This phone has a LOT of options and they are all over the friggin place.
  • Where certain options are doesn’t always make sense.
• This phone doesn’t ‘WOW’ me. In a lot of ways the PIM/PDA functions are just hard to use. That may be function of not having some of the 2.5 million options set up correctly but it’s not always intuitive.
  • For two days it’s had some sort of new message indicator that I can’t make go away.
    • It’s not an email
    • It’s not a voice mail
    • It’s not an SMS message
    • But it thinks there is a new message somewhere. Now on palmOS you’d tap this icon and it take you there. You can’t get to this icon and it isn’t a button.
• To move more than myself to this we abandon Good[tm] and have to buy BES server plus licenses.

All that being said, the goodness of the phone almost makes up for the pda shortcomings. If my Treo were lost or broken I could replace it with the Blackberry and be OK.

But I’m not looking for just ‘OK’

I’d like to get my hands on the Samsung i760 that’s rumored. Hell it was rumored in January but it doesn’t look like it will hit the streets for another month or two. I’m not a big Windows Mobile fan by a long shot but at least it wouldn’t cost me more since Exchange push is essentially free.

The current crop of phones is not good, not for Enterprise users. I think BB is resting on it’s laurels in some areas. Finally they have a decent phone, now they need to make major strides on the PDA portion.

Our current data enabled device pool consists of mainly Palm Treo’s. We have a couple 700p’s and a 650 here and there. The Treo’s are still very functional, and with Good[tm] software on them, Exchange sync and collaboration is still pretty good.

The problem with the Treo’s is well documented. Their bluetooth implementation is complete garbage. It also has some network/multitasking related issues. About half the time you’re trying to surf (if you can call it that), send an SMS, or compose an email and it will just freeze for 20 seconds or so.

This is really, really annoying.

The device itself is getting somewhat dated. It’s fat, and just generally not stylish these days. It is to me the stone axe of mobile handhelds. The phone (outside of it’s dicked up BT) is a decent phone, and Good[tm] makes it good. I have yet to find a keyboard that works as well as the Treo’s.

But it’s time to find something else, hopefully something better and this was the best Verizon had to offer.

(yeah the iPhone is cool and neeto, but I’ll beat on it at a later date, we’re stuck with Verizon and they don’t have the iPhone).

First, registering or activating this phone was the easy part usually is.

The next step involved getting the Blackberry Enterprise Express server up and running.

(Here’s the rub for all you Good[tm] people, good doesn’t do Blackberry anymore, so if you switch your Good[tm] investment is out the window. That can be pricey.

What a pain this installation was. It was very much like installing Goodlink, only worse. I have a buddy testing the same phone, he was able to install the software mostly w/o a hitch. His environment is a little different though.

Apparently you cannot have terminal services enabled on the same server as Blackberry Enterprise server. The installer didn’t like it, and things didn’t go well if you marched forward. Fair enough, 1 hour wasted.

I located another server to do the dirty work. Of course I didn’t have Outlook, nor the Exchange tools, so therefore no MAPI on the server. (My problem, not Blackberry’s) In case you need this, and don’t want to install everything MS does publish a stand-alone mapi components installer here.

Once that was complete the installation was pretty much by the book, although very time consuming.

After adding my device, authorizing it and syncing it up, life was good until I tried to send a message. This was an exercise in futility. The Blackberry installation tool kit, a collection of docs and how-to-install-for-dummies. Is pretty good. Good until you have an issue. Calling Blackberry is even less helpful. Google to the rescue? I Googled my but off and it became clear that this had to be a permissions issue in exchange. I checked, double-checked, triple-checked, and couldn’t find it. I stopped and started the information store, stop and started the BB Enterprise server, all to no avail.

Then some magic happened and it just started working.

So far in about 6 hours of playing with this phone, I think it’s growing on me. It’s taking a while to break from the years of Good[tm] habits I’m used too. There are things that still aren’t obvious, and a lot of things that are just plain horrible.

There are too many icons/applications for the functionality of this phone. All the preferences are spread all over the place, and there are only 3.2 million options. Options are good, but damn, there are a LOT of them.

I miss the Treo touch screen already, and the ball thingy on the 8830 is OK, but the 5-way navigator on the Treo is better.

Things like sorting messages or getting back to the top aren’t so obvious on this phone after you’ve scrolled that little ball for 10 minutes to get to emails from two days ago.

On a scale of 1-10, I find usability of this thing to be around a 5.5. Yeah, it’s OK, but it aint great. Blackberry has had good email devices and shitty phones. The phone part of this thing seems decent but I’m not sure the Blackberry software is all that user friendly, at least not what I would expect in the day and age of OS X, Vista, iPhones, and stuff like that.

We’ll see if I can grow to like it.