Loway is proud to announce the release of WombatDialer 18.08; a focus on visibility, future-proofing and integration makes it the intelligent dialer of choice for your modern call-centre.

On top of this, about 70 bugs and minor issues were fixed.

We wanted to make it easier to understand what WombatDialer is doing. Why is the dialer calling so slowly? why is it making just so many calls? should I use a larger batch size when reading calls?

It is now possible to get insight into the decisions WombatDialer is taking when running a campaign - so you can see if the dialing is limited by not having more channels, or by a slow database access, or because you forgot to define and end-point for that campaign, so it will not dial at all!

We have also added a way to run connection tests to servers, trunks and end-points. Often an incorrect dial string, or the wrong password, or a mis-spelled queue name, would leave you wondering what was wrong. No more! Just click a button, and a test will be run to assess that the component is working as expected.

We have added hints and tips to some GUI editors, so that expected formats of variables and itens are displayed exactly where you need them.

We have also improved the sparkline graphs that display in real-time how many calls are being dialed, so it is easier to see how multple runs interact with each other and whether you are dialing at full speed or not.

The real-time page is now snappier in displaying updated information coming from the dialer, making the interaction more pleasant and easier to use.

WombatDialer 18.08 allows you select the kind of server it connects to. At the moment, it’s either a normal AMI connection to Asterisk or a 'Fake server' that will simulate a PBX receiving traffic - quite useful for load tests, without having to manually create the PBXs for your infrastructure.

In the future, this gives us the opportunity to better support different PBXs - e.g. different ways to connect to Asterisk, or support for specific models / makes.

If you have run Wombat in high-load scenarios, you know that sometimes Wombat has a problem - it dials too fast! Depending on the kind of agreement you have with them, some upstream providers may not like receiving too many calls at once and may black-list you for a while if you do. To solve this problem, it is now possible to enforce a specific CPS (Calls Per Second) rate for each trunk, so that you do not risk flooding your provider when you launch a new campaign.

We also improved the campaign scheduler in order to have a fairer attribution of calls to different campaigns when running multiple campaigns in parallel with the same importance.

WombatDialer improved its QueueMetrics integration by reporting variables and attributes to the "queue" side of the call - so they wil appear automatically on the Agent’s page in QueueMetrics, and integrations with CRM’s and intranet applications will "just happen" as for any other inbound call in QueueMetrics.

This means that that information is immediately available on the QueueMetrics Icon page, so the agent can see and you can also use it to control automated CRM screen-pops.

WombatDialer was updated to run on a modern Java 8/Tomcat 8 infrastructure. JDBC drivers were updated to the new high-performace MariaDB drivers. Existing systems doing a migration should look on the User Manual for specific tips. Starting from this version, we do not support CentOS 5 systems anymore (but they are obsolete and insecure - if you still run them, it’s time to move on).

We now allow for HTTPS interactions in all service calls that can be defined in WombatDialer.

WombatDialer also supports secure password storage, to better protect your user accounts.

WombatDialer 18 now has an integrated script that is used to clean the database of obsolete and unused data. While this is not required but on the biggest systems, it will make your life easier when maintaining and backing-up the system.