Call Center Services Featured Article

OpenSpan Intros Release 4.5

By Brendan B. Read
Senior Contributing Editor

Solutions that help organizations and employees get the most of their applications deliver powerful ROI for that reason. These tools analyze how users utilize their applications and in doing so identify and report on bottlenecks that lead to reduced productivity and in some cases software becoming shelfware because employees won’t touch them.

In turn the developers of such products continually monitor how they are used and look into how to enhance them. OpenSpan, for one, has done just that and has come out with and released OpenSpan Release 4.5, redeveloped for both Microsoft (News - Alert) Visual Studio and non-Microsoft Visual Studio developers. Visual Studio developers can now leverage their existing Microsoft developer tools to rapidly create and distribute OpenSpan (News - Alert) projects from within Visual Studio. The release additionally offers support for Microsoft's Windows 7 operating environment.

Both Studio products are available as free downloads directly from OpenSpan's new developer community at www.openspan.com/community. The OpenSpan Developer Community includes online training, forums, discussion boards and many code samples demonstrating the new Release 4.5 features.

 Here are the OpenSpan Release 4.5 highlights:

 *          Enterprise applications enhancements

OpenSpan has enhanced the UI integration support for SAP, Oracle (News - Alert) and several other enterprise applications. Additionally, the salesforce.com toolbox component has been updated to enable rapid visual integration through the popular force.com API.

 *          OpenSpan Events

This introduces new monitoring capabilities that enable automatic monitoring of user and application interactions, including how long applications are active, what objects are interacted with, and for how long. OpenSpan Events collects data for business process improvement, fraud and compliance monitoring, agent performance, contact center metrics, and enterprise application usage – both for historical analysis as well as publishing real-time events and alerts to BPMS/BAM/CEP systems.

*          New rich user interface capabilities

Users can create new rich user interfaces that combine (i.e. mash up) elements from existing applications into Windows Forms or user-created WPF, Silverlight and other custom interfaces and applications.

*          Advanced .NET (News - Alert) development

With the OpenSpan Plug-in for Visual Studio, developers can now combine OpenSpan integration points and APIs with code and applications created natively in Visual Studio. This enables developers to write automations either visually with the OpenSpan Studio designer or to write automations in any .NET-supported language. Additionally, developers can create and/or reference .NET components directly from within OpenSpan automations.

“As a member of the Microsoft Visual Studio Integrated Partner (VSIP) program, OpenSpan is pleased to offer a fully integrated plug-in for Visual Studio,” said Eric Musser, CEO of OpenSpan. “With millions of Visual Studio developers worldwide, it certainly opens up a much larger developer community that can utilize OpenSpan technology to improve end-user processes.”