Contact Expert v7.4 for Skype for Business Server
External Services
Contact Expert is prepared to cooperate with a number of external - customer provided - systems in order to accomplish certain tasks like looking up email addresses from a corporate directory service, or using alternate routing mechanisms based on agent insight, etc. This document is a list of references to all of these various systems.
ACD Plugins
Detailed description about ACD Plugins is available on the following link: Management of ACD Plugins
ACD Policies
Detailed description about ACD Policies is available on the following link: Management of ACD Policies
Address Books
Contact Expert's Address Book service relies on external directory services – Microsoft Active Directory – to periodically look up and fetch contact information from, in order to speed up working with voice and email tasks. When typing in a phone number or an email address in the agent application, the system presents a list of phone numbers or email addresses fetched from the directory service, so agents would not need to enter the full address by hand, they can click the entry presented.
To retrieve Email addresses, AddressBook service queries those AD objects which have:
- any of the types: groups, person, contact
- attributes specified: name AND mail
AddressBook service receives email addresses from the the mail attribute.
To retrieve Phone Numbers, AddressBook service queries those AD objects which have:
- any of the types: person, contact
- attributes specified: name AND (mobile OR telephoneNumber)
AddressBook service receives phone numbers from the mobile and telephoneNumber attributes only. It does not retrieve phone numbers from legacy phone number attributes like home, pager, fax.
There can be a single Address Book resource configured for each tenant.
Configuring Address Books
The Address Book resource defines the connection to the external directory service. It also stores the downloaded contact information for agents to use.
- Navigate to Infrastructure → External Services → Address Books.
- Click Edit of a preferred entry.
- Specify the details described below.
- Click Submit to save changes.
An Address Book has the following details to specify. The ones marked with asterisk are mandatory in order to enable the feature.
| FQDN | Specify the host name (IP address) of the external directory service to which your tenant connects. |
| Port | Specify the port of the directory service through which your tenant connects. |
| Additional Attributes | Specify any extra contact fields of the external directory service the search should cover. |
| Search Filter | If needed, you can limit the number of directory service entries to download from the LDAP source by specifying values in any LDAP field. When set, only entries conforming to the filter are going to be downloaded from the LDAP source. If left empty, CE will download address book entries where both the Display Name and Email LDAP fields are filled. It will download both groups and person type records. |
| Username | Define the username to use to log in to the directory service. |
| Password | Enter the password that belongs to the username of the directory service. |
| Search Root | Specify the point in the directory service hierarchy the search should start from. |
| Synchronization Period | Define the time interval for searching the directory service and refreshing the list of entries downloaded. |
| Enabled | If this box is checked, the Address Book service will start searching the directory service periodically and download any entries matching the configuration. |
| Enable Windows authentication | If this box is checked, the Address Book service will connect to the directory service using Windows authentication. |
Enabling Address Book Service
On top of being able to enable or disable the Address Book resource above, supervisors can switch the email address search function on or off separately in the Agent Policy of the tenant. Both the Address Book resource and the relevant Agent Policy must be enabled for the functionality to operate.
- Navigate to Operations → Agents → Agent Policies.
- Click Edit of the particular agent policy entry.
- Find the Enable Address Book Service checkbox and check it.
- Use Submit to save the changes.
Disabling this Agent Policy will stop offering email contacts to the agents entering email addresses in the agent application, however it will not stop the Address Book resource to keep on searching and re-downloading entries from the external directory service.
For further information on this, and other Address Book related Agent Policy entries please visit the Agent Policies article.