Friday, December 09, 2005

Snapshot build available with new features

We've finished enough new features that we wanted to have people test them out, but not we have not finished our TODO for 1.1.9 yet. We want to make sure these features have enough testing time out there in the wild before they make it into the 1.1.9 release. We have been running this code for the last few days in our main office so they work for us. Here is the major list of changes over 1.1.8:

- Added Load Balancing of Inbound and Outbound calls across multiple Asterisk servers in the same setup
- Removed all PHP globals requirements, can now use register_globals=Off in PHP
- Added security elements to admin pages and added record deletion functions
- And lots of little stuff(see the TODO.txt)

Other than the obviously security-motivated changes to the admin pages, the other major feature in this snapshot is load balancing of Outbound and Closer calls(Inbound load-balancing will be included in the 1.1.9 release). There are two types of Load-balancing:
1- Overflow Load Balancing, where the call will first go to the next agent that is available on the server that the call is originated from and then it looks for the next available agent on any other server on the network.
2- Load Balancing, where the call will look for the next available agent across the entire network with no preference for a particular server

The Overflow balancing is preferrable if you want to reduce on calls going over IAX channels between servers thus reducing load in some instances.

We have been running this in two of our locations for the last two weeks and it has improved our efficiency by upto 20%.

Download the snapshot(astguiclient_2005-12-09.zip) in the experimantal downloads section of the project site or just click here.

And let me know what you think of it.