We’ve been preparing slideshows, posters and handouts all week. I’ll preview some of them soon.

Since this week, TalkerBee is available on Opera too. So all commonly used browsers are supported!

At first we mostly focused on community websites, where TalkerBee is the glue that keeps the users together. We launched our new WIO-component (see previous blog post) on our website, and enhanced the user experience and loading of the IM components.

When talking to webdevelopers, designers and other companies, the need to link the TalkerBee users with the web-owners was mentioned several times. More specific, the help-desk or live chat scenario, has become one of our most recent developments. From the start of TalkerBee, we chose SIP as a backend technology, to enhance scalability, flexibility to multiple platforms and multiple clients (and in the future, multiple ways of communication, e.g. audio/video). This way, the step of linking our Intellivic Softphone to the TalkerBee service was not as big as it might seem. At this point, we have a demo up and running, where a helpdesk member, or secretary can use a very convenient desktop client to log in. This user will from then on be shown online on the website that integrates TalkerBee. Visitors of that website can benefit from the ease of using TalkerBee, to communicate with the helpdesk.

Furthermore we have other developments that might very soon enhance this solution, our Intellivic Flash-to-SIP Gateway enables easy audio/video communication from any website. Contacting the helpdesk by means of audio (or video) will be available soon.

We might start thinking of launching a new – helpdesk specific – service that combines these 3 technologies (TalkerBee – Intellivic – Flash-to-SIP) in the best possible way to serve customers.

Our old "Who Is Online"-component

We decided to change the behavior of this rather statical component, and make it more usable in any website. We targeted a flexible component, that would offer – next to wio – a possibility for presence changes, and some kind of conversation-window-management. Let me demonstrate this with some screenshots:

We are quite proud of this new component. Of course, customers that prefer the old component can still keep using this one on demand.
Some new features are coming up in the next couple of weeks, I’ll keep you updated!

As a host-site, I used a copied version of some pages of our own E-business website: Archonia. Archonia is a popular online Anime and Manga store and an interesting testcase for TalkerBee.

Whilst we are not integrating TalkerBee in Archonia directly, we are hoping to convince the Archonia board with the demo we have put online. TalkerBee meets Archonia. There are several actors that can log in as a demonstration: Hiroshi, an author of Anime content, Bunny, Donkey and Piggy, three customers, that have written reviews in the past, and Archonia, the helpdesk user. When logging in with these characters, the power of TalkerBee is demonstrated. You can contact other users that have bought articles you might be interested in. This gives you the opportunity to ask some concrete questions. Maybe you get a chance to talk to the author himself, or ask some questions about your order to the Archonia helpdesk.

Copying some Archonia pages, and creating static versions took me about 2 hours. Integrating TalkerBee in those pages, took me only 30 minutes!

Everyone can demo these public pages, login and password are identical, and are the names I mentioned before.

I’ve spent some time comparing different systems, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Sugar CRM, VTiger, but since VTiger was open source (which is always enchanted in our software company), completely free and seemed to be able to serve all the purposes, we pretty soon chose VTiger. I have to mention that JumpBox offered an ideal way to test VTiger in depth easily. Everything you need is a VMWare player and you are ready to test all the features.

Our system administrator was able to install VTiger pretty easy on FreeBSD, and on we went. At this point, I use VTiger every day to check the status of the different accounts, insert contacts and new potentials,… IVtiger sums up pretty well on how we are doing with TalkerBee. I’ve installed an Outlook Connector, which allows me to associate emails with accounts/contacts with one click. When I get contacts on the phone, it’s very easy to look up the history of communications we have had. Furthermore (future) colleagues are able to jump into the system and help our customers probably in the same way as I am able to help them.

One thing we haven’t figured out yet, is how to use VTiger for multiple projects. When we want to use it for our Intellivic Product Line for example, we seem to have two (both unsatisfying) options:

1. We create a new VTiger environment, which will defintely cause redundancy, since some customers will be in both systems.
2. We put Intellivic accounts in the same VTiger environment, resulting in an unclear situation, where you don’t easily see which account belongs to which product.

Maybe a solution will pop up in the near future. Anyway at this point, I’m very satisfied with VTiger, it has definitely increased my productivity and the way I get in contact with our customers.

TalkerBee, or the Community Presence Project, as it was called before, was discussed the first time in the beginning of 2008. The basic idea was: Make it possible that users can chat with eachother through the website they are visiting. So if me and my friend were both logged in on www.geocaching.com, we would be able to contact eachother, without using an external application.

Pretty early, we had some basic requirements:

• No end-user installation
• Full (seemless) integration with the customer website
• A flexible Instant Messaging component (pref. overlay)
• Low impact on customer data

Our developers started rapid prototyping and the first conceptual presentations were given in february 2008. The potential of this project was shown early on, when we met some large companies we had done business with before. In this perspective, we started building our first prototype.

In the mean time, we were collecting the building blocks for a good business model. Choosing a decent name caused a lot of trouble. After some months of discussion, TalkerBee was born. We set up a website, which would integrate the TalkerBee service itself pretty soon. We defined several target audiences, and the first strategy to reach would be a well-thought reseller model. We started looking for webdevelopment companies with a strong connection to highly interactive websites, and contacted them for cooperation.

At this point, we have a fully operational website and service online. We offer a free service for websites with a limited amount of simultaneous users – of course we add advertisements ourselves in this model – and bring specific solutions to large customers. The service is at this point being integrated by several webdevelopment companies in their customers’ websites. I’ll be happy to announce some in the short future.

In the meantime, we became a member of the Federation of Webdevelopment companies in Belgium (FeWeb) to be able to contact new partners more easily. Hopefully this will allow us to grow rapidly to a well-known robust service, that enables webdevelopers world-wide to bring their websites to life.

To be continued…

I’ll try and keep you updated as much as possible on new TalkerBee evolutions/developments/business cases.

Have fun, and feel free to comment!