Building Productivity-Boosting Applications for Your Cisco IP Phones
The Cisco IP phone, an integral part of the Cisco AVVID (Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data) IP telephony solution, is a new breed of phone—more an Internet appliance than a standard telephone. In addition to the usual phone features, Cisco IP phones can be used for data entry and lookup, call accounting, information delivery, and much more. Like a PC, it can be customized and configured to help solve your organization's unique business problems, increase productivity, and even generate revenue. How far you can expand the role of your Cisco IP phone is bounded only by your own imagination.
Unlike traditional business telephone sets, Cisco IP phones use XML over HTTP to communicate with Web servers for information retrieval and content generation. By hitting any compatible Web server, a Cisco IP phone can download the information stored there just as if it were a PC. By interfacing applications such as LotusNotes with services on Cisco IP phones, you can accomplish the tasks you need to make phone users more productive and increase the return on your Cisco AVVID IP telephony investment.
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FIGURE 1: Cisco IP Phone 7960 displaying the SERVICES menu.
Service Stations
A phone service is basically an application, written like a script, that the IP phone executes to acquire and display targeted information. The information accessed can be as simple as a weather forecast or restaurant menu, or as complex as a voice-response system for pharmacists mixing compound drugs.
Anyone with a basic understanding of Web development and the right tools can create phone services. Services are created using the objects, tags, and tools provided in the Cisco IP Phone Services Software Developer's Kit available as a free download from the Cisco Developer Support Web site (cisco.com/warp/public/570/avvid/voice_ip/cm_xml/index.html). In addition, the new Cisco Press book, Developing Cisco IP Phone Services: A Cisco AVVID Solution (see sidebar) provides expanded tools, detailed code samples, object and tag definitions, and advanced techniques to help you create the services you require. There's also a Web site called HotDispatch (www.hotdispatch.com/cisco-ip-telephony) where you can hire an independent application writer to create a service to meet your unique requirements. Or you can select a service from the variety of existing applications already for sale.
Inspiration
Now that you know how to write phone applications, or who can write them for you, how do you determine what type of services are needed most? One way is to get to know your IP phone users. What do they do? What problems do they have that need to be solved? Apply your creativity: Ask yourself how text- or voice-based access to real-time data can save these users time, solve issues related to their work environment, or enhance their lives. While your users know their jobs better than you do, they probably don't know the true power of the technology sitting on their desks. By taking the time to train your users on the features, benefits, and customizable nature of the Cisco IP phone and AVVID IP telephony solution, you may be pleasantly surprised by some of the exciting ideas that they bring to you. Here are a few examples to inspire you and your users.
School Tools
AAC, a Cisco Premier Certified Partner, developed a suite of services called PhoneTop K-12. A school district in the northeast US uses PhoneTop K-12 on their Cisco AVVID IP telephony network to replace tedious, handwritten tasks such as taking attendance and issuing hall passes. The phones also provide classroom schedules on demand as well as pictures of the students—a welcome security enhancement (Figure 2). Through the power of IP phone services, the school district was able to simplify several cumbersome administrative processes, further leveraging the investment they had already made in their IP telephony network.
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FIGURE 2: School personnel can view student photos right on the phone.
Hands-Free Pharmacy
Pharmacists who mix custom prescription compounds, such as testosterone cream, thyroxine, or morphine in syrup form, need access to a database that lists the compounding formulas for each prescription. However, the need to maintain a sterile environment makes thumbing through notebooks or typing on a PC keyboard an inconvenient if not unsafe method for obtaining mixing instructions.
Calence, a Cisco Gold Partner, developed a service called MyRX that pulls content from the pharmacy database via the Web. Pharmacists are able to use their existing IP phone to connect to the pharmacy database containing the complete mixing instructions for all complex compounds. Voice recognition preserves the sterile environment by allowing the pharmacist to lookup the required information without constantly removing and replacing sterile gloves to use the phone—saving both time and money.
From the MyRX screen, the pharmacist, using natural pharmaceutical terminology, either speaks a command to the phone or speaks the word "help" to learn how to frame the command in a manner that the service can process (Figure 3). In addition to presenting the information on the phone's display, the service presents the same information verbally via the speaker on the Cisco IP phone.
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FIGURE 3: The MyRX service recognizes pharmaceutical terminology and
provides help to teach pharmacists how to phrase their queries.
The pharmacist issues a verbal command and the MyRX service either displays the mixing instructions for the requested compound, or asks the pharmacist to specify additional information about the prescription (Figure 4). For example, the system verbally asks the user, "Would you like the syrup to be preserved? Say YES if you want preserved syrup. Say NO if you want preservative-free syrup." The text on the phone's display shows the same information that is being verbally prompted to the user. The pharmacist specifies whether the syrup should be preserved or not and the system displays the compound formula (Figure 5). The pharmacist can scroll up and down to display the entire formula or say "print" to have the formula sent to a printer.
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FIGURE 4: If more detailed information is needed, the MyRX service
prompts the pharmacist, both onscreen and verbally through the speaker, to
provide the necessary information.
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FIGURE 5: The compound formula is displayed onscreen. Soft keys allow the
pharmacist to research the compound further, or print a copy of the
formula.
Advertising Revenue
College students and pizza: an inseparable combination. Imagine you own a pizza parlor just blocks away from the largest dorm on campus. The university has deployed Cisco AVVID IP telephony and there are Cisco IP phones in every dorm room. For a fee, you can promote your pies to students through the phone's display. You get to advertise your pizza to the hungriest demographic in your market—right on the phone they'll use to order the pizza—and the university gets to pocket a recurring return on investment.
Universities, hotels, cruise ships, and other hospitality industries can benefit from the Cisco IP phone's capability to display advertising on the phone. Ads can be displayed automatically when the phone is not in use (Figure 6) or a service can provide restaurant listings in the area. Soft keys allow phone users to select a restaurant to browse its menu or speed dial the restaurant at the touch of a button (Figure 7).
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FIGURE 6: You can use the IdleURL setting to specify a banner that
displays on the phone when it is not in use.
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FIGURE 7: Services can provide a wealth of information through multiple
screens accessed via soft keys.
Developing useful phone services that increase productivity or solve business problems is not a difficult undertaking. All it takes is some code and a little imagination. Deploy a few simple services and your users will soon be wondering how they ever got by without their IP phone network.
Developing Cisco IP Phone Services
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FIGURE 8: Book cover
Developing Cisco IP Phone Services: A Cisco AVVID Solution from Cisco Press provides all the information you need to create your own phone services. Written by Darrick Deel, Mark Nelson, and Anne Smith, the book takes you from basic concepts to advanced programming, and includes detailed service examples and descriptions of all the objects, tags and HTTP headers you'll need. A CD-ROM included with the book provides additional development tools such as the XML Validator, which checks your service for validity against the Cisco IP Phone Services Schema, and the CallManager Simulator, an application that mimics a Cisco CallManager so you can write phone services with just a Web server and a Cisco IP phone.
The book and CD also contain many code samples and a free phone service called Voice Anomaly Tracking which allows phone users to capture voice quality statistics and automatically log the information to a file that the system administrator accesses. Developing Cisco IP Phone Services (ISBN: 1-58705-060-9) is available at local bookstores, online booksellers, computer and electronics superstores, and other venues where computer technology books are sold. For information on corporate bulk or education purchases and sales outside the US, visit the URL ciscopress.com/sales.