Application and dialer on different servers

I am looking at using Voicent BroadcastByPhone as a phone dialer component in a system I am designing for a client. I have a question regarding the software’s capabilities in importing and exporting data to files. It’s possible that our application and our dialer component will sit on different servers. In this case, I would need the application to export a list of calls that need to be made which could then be imported or loaded in some way by the dialer software, which would then make calls as required.

Yes, it is not a problem to have your application and the dialer on different servers. Voicent auto dialer software has command line interface that can be invoked like:

vcast.exe -import mylist.csv -startnow ...

For more information about the command line interface, please see the Help Topics under the program Help menu. There are various ways you can execute a command on a remote computer. The best way depends on what type of operating systems your application is on (Voicent software runs on Windows).

There is actually a better way to communicate with Voicent software on a different server. That is to use Voicent’s web interface instead of the file based import and export. To trigger a call from your application, in most cases, all you need to do is a single line of code:

call_ivr("123-456-7890", "hello world");

Since this interface is basically a web client to the Voicent software on a remote computer, you can use almost any programming language you choose. More information about this Simple Call Interface and its IVR extension can be found online.

The dialer software would record the results of the calls and then export these into a file which would then be imported by the application so that the results of the calls could be recorded in its database.

If you choose to use BroadcastByPhone, then you can use its call back function. You define this function or HTTP posting URL, they will be automatically executed after a call is finished. You can use it to update your own application. More information is also available in the program help file.

If you choose to use the simple call interface with IVR, then you can update your application in the IVR application you designed.

From looking around your site, it seems that BroadcastByPhone can do most of this but I can’t find any info on whether it could handle the importing and exporting. Are you able to advise me on whether it can import and export in this way and, if so, what file formats would be required?

The file format for BroadcastByPhone is a CSV (comma separated value) file.

Thanks for your response. I won’t be able to run BroadcastByPhone on my application server as it runs Linux. What I really needed to know was whether BroadcastByPhone can (a) import a list of calls to make in the form of something like a CSV file, and (b) export the results of those calls (not the audio recordings but just facts like whether the call was answered, which selections were made by the recipient, etc.) into another file. Can you please tell me whether it can do these things?

Yes, the program can do import and export through a .CSV file. The selection made by recipient will be saved in the “Confirmation” column.

One other question: if I had my application talking directly to BroadcastByPhone via PHP commands instead of using an import/export method as described above, could I specify hours of the day when calls would be placed (for eg., 9am-5pm) instead of having calls made immediately?

Yes. If you look to the details of the PHP function, the call request is posted to a URL. That URL accepts many different parameters such as call time. For details, please see outbound call scheduler reference. In addition, you can specify allowed outbound call time on the gateway.