[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Christmas vacation and EG add-ons

[Don McMorris]

On Dec 21, 2007 12:26 PM, Bill Ott <bott at grpl.org> wrote:
> What I'm doing on my Christmas vacation (aka - vacations, work with
> few(er) interruptions).
>
Yeah... I have no idea what you're talking about here... ;-)
>
> As I prepare to leave the office for the next week and a half, I'm oddly
> enough planning to work on toys for Evergreen.  Before I get too deep
> into reinventing wheels, I thought I'd ask who might be already working
> with either of the following:
>
>
> LibraryFind (libraryfind.org).
>   Our first venture down Ruby on Rails (I'll leave out the discussion of
> where chic new languages come from) and it looks like it might be an
> easy add-on to Evergreen -- with OpenSearch all ready to go.  Add in a
> tag cloud and it begins to look an awfully lot like some other product
> for tens of thousands more...
>
As far as I know, there hasn't been an effort on this.  It certainly
sounds interesting!
>
> A telephone notification system for holds/overdues.  I see a lot of
> different add-ons and options for Asterisk, which seems like an obvious
> choice, so I've got my old Asterisk box dusted off and ready to go.  Has
> anyone else started barking up this tree?
>
We (that is, ESI) did talk with a third-party provider back in
September about this, and they had a very simple method of submitting
jobs.  However, as far as I know, there hasn't been much actual
development on this (IIRC, it was projected as a V3 module... back
when V1 was still 6 months away ;)).

We may've talked also about re-vamping the whole notification system
to allow easy "plugin" development as new communication media comes
along (although, this may've been just me dreaming again... I don't
remember).  I mean, current notification media might include E-Mail
(already in place), Voice Phone, VoIP, IM, SMS, pager, etc.  Even in
just the IM category, we have several protocols (OSCAR [AOL], MSN,
Yahoo, Jabber, SILC, IRC...).  It seems to make sense to me to make
the notification system quite modular.  Also, voice notification could
be done using several protocols (local software modem on POTS, Digium
card on POTS, T1 voice, SIP [or other VoIP] trunk, outsourced [simply
pass the messages to another provider for them to call], etc).

Mike: Do you remember any talk on this, or have any current thoughts?
>
>
Just something I want to throw in also is interactive telephony and
IVR.  I certainly expect Evergreen Telephony 1.0 to be outbound-only,
but I would certainly like to encourage the flexibility to easily add
the inevitable dial-in or interactive support.  What I mean by this
is, call-to-renew, call-to-check-on-current-items-out,
call-to-check-hold-status, transfer-to-librarian, etc.  You could also
substitute "call" with "IM", "SMS", "E-Mail", or whatever.
>
>
Lastly, there may've been some discussion on-list (and possibly on the
wiki) regarding telephony and/or notifications.  May be worth a
search.

Thanks for your interest and contributions!

Sincerely,
--Don