Using Connect Pro to Provide Rich Helpdesk Support, Part 1

Many of our customers use Connect Pro as a tool for their IT support helpdesk. It enables people to be on the same page quickly as they both look at the same thing and is critical to drive down average call duration. Internally at Adobe, our helpdesk team built an AIR application that enables any employee to start a chat conversation with a service agent and at any time the conversation can be escalated into a screen-sharing session to accelerate the resolution.

In fact, Alistair Lee did a demonstration of this in another tutorial.

The question, I am getting asked a lot is how to log people immediately in the meeting room to by-pass the login screen. In the case of a helpdesk use case it dramatically streamlines the workflow to get the user in the room. Combined with the screen sharing push functionality introduced in Connect Pro 7, this makes for a very pleasant experience.

Let's look at how to do this in Part 1 of this Tutorial.

Logging Someone Automatically in a Meeting Room as a Guest

Here is the URL you need to send:

http://[domain_name]/system/login-guest?account-id=[accountid]&next=/_a[accountID]/[roomname]&path=/_a[accountID]/[roomname]&set-lang=en&guestName=[username]

[domain_name] is the domain of your Connect Pro deployment, for example admin.acrobat.com

[accountid] is your account id within that domain name. To retrieve the account id, just launch a meeting room and look for the number that fits between your domain name and the meeting room name. For example, if I launch http://breeze36139221.acrobat.com/support1/, the url in the browser becomes https://admin.acrobat.com/_a54500361/support1/. "54500361" is the account ID.

[roomname] is the unique identified for the meeting room in the room url. In the example above, http://breeze36139221.acrobat.com/support1/ it is "support1"

[username] is the name you want to give to the guest that you will log into the meeting room.

So in my example the URL would be:

http://admin.acrobat.com/system/login-guest?account-id=54500361&next=/_a54500361/support1&path=/_a54500361/support1&set-lang=en&guestName=Reindeer

Try it for yourself and let us know what you think by leaving a comment!

Continue on to Part 2 of this series where we will discuss how to request control of the user's screen and other topics.