Hi there,
Is there any reliable way to link Asterisk with Contact Management software such as ACT or Maximizer or ?
What I’d like to do is have the Contact Management software open up customer information based on the Caller ID of incoming callers. I envision the contact management software running on a Windows PC with a Caller ID client connected to both Asterisk and the contact management software. Seems like it would be useful enough that someone would have done something like this by now.
The will depend on whether or not the CRM software you’re using has a decent API programmers can tap into. If it does, you (or someone you hire) may be able to write an appropriate plug-in for the CRM software to (a) accept incoming call information and (b) display the appropriate records.
Then it’s mainly just a matter of getting Asterisk to pump the information out – AGI would work for this.
Obviously there’s other program logic in there that needs to be written (like which computer’s receiving the call information), but every office’s needs are going to be different, so I can’t really comment on what else would need to happen. A good programmer (if you aren’t one yourself) will be able to address all that.
For what it’s worth, ACT appears to have a very extensive interface available for developers.
after investigating a bit further, I have found a project called AstTAPI.
sourceforge.net/projects/asttapi/
They specifically mention ACT! and Outlook but I still haven’t figured out if it’s working yet and does what I want it to.
Surprised nobody replied with this info. I have been experimenting a bit with AstTAPI. It’s basically just a driver for Windows. Since Windows already has TAPI support built in it basically gives Windows direct access to Asterisk for Caller ID incoming and outgoing events plus a lot of other stuff.
Any Windows application that supports TAPI such as Outlook can use it. So far it works great. I can dial out of whatever Channel I want via Outlook contacts and with an added application called IdentaPop I can have Outlook pop up contact info based on incoming caller ID. Pretty slick!