Recent enhancements to QuestionPoint

Enhancements installed on July 29, 2007

(Completed: July 2007)

New Chat Features

NEW PATRON line shows time elapsed.

When a New patron appears in your chat monitor, you can see how long the patron has been waiting.  The Time column counts up in 10-second increments.  In the 24/7 Cooperative this helps librarians see immediately if they should wait for the home library, if monitoring, to pick up (a sixty-second wait is recommended) or pick up the patron themselves.

PRACTICE CHAT FORM opens for any monitoring library within the same BME.

Before this release, only the library that opened the Chat Patron Practice Form could see the patron in their Practice Queue.  With this release, multiple libraries within the same BME can practice with one another using the practice form.  Remember that you must select the Practice Queue to see "patrons" using the Chat Patron Practice Form.

PATRON’S CHAT FORM CAPABILITIES display enhanced.

Librarians can see additional information about the patron’s chat form capabilities with this release.  The patron information area for patrons using the new Chat Preview 2 displays "Chat: Text, Links" to indicate that this patron’s form can accept text and links only.  This is the first in a series of enhancements planned for patron form control.

User Apparent Fixes

SESSION/WAIT TIMES now sortable in Excel

Session times and wait times are now stored correctly so they are sortable when imported to an Excel spreadsheet without the need to convert the integer type.

SAVED OFFLINE REPORT holds institution selection

Group administrators wishing to run offline reports on a single institution can now save that report intact.  Heretofore, all parameters of the report were saved except the institution name.  That bug is fixed with this release.

PATRON'S ACCOUNT INTERFACE locks in-progress chat session.

In some cases, when a patron navigated away and returned to the chat monitor after being timed out (two minutes), they would use the patron account link to log into their account and continue the chat dialogue.  This could occur only if the librarian had not yet closed the chat session from the librarian monitor.  When it did occur, multiple notification messages were sent, often resulting in confusion.

Now, a session that has not yet been closed by the librarian, whether ended or not, is locked in the patron’s account the same way it is locked in the library’s Ask module.  The patron is unable to act on that session in any way until it is closed.