ARA: The Asterisk Realtime Architecture.

Agent: a person working at the monitored call center and answering to calls. Asterisk offers a way for agents not to be bound by physical telephone terminals but to log on to tell the system they are available.

Aggregate queue: see → Composite queue.

Atomic queue: a queue that matches one-to-one to an underlying Asterisk queue.

Call analyst: a person whose job is to grade agent’s calls through the QA system. This may be a specific job or an agent.

Call-back agent: an agent that will not stay on-line, but which telephone will be rung by Asterisk when a call comes in for him.

Caller: a person calling the Asterisk system

Call-file: a function in Asterisk, where by writing a specially-crafted file, it is possible to interact with the dial-plan. With a modern version of Asterisk, it is generally better to use the Manager interface.

Campaign: a set of outbound calls placed for a given purpouse.

Composite queue: A virtual queue made of more than one atomic queue. Useful for reporting all center activity at once.

DNIS (Dialed Number Identification Service) is a service that tracks which telephone number was dialed by a customer (e.g in case of multiple incoming numbers).

Engagement code: an acronym that represents a grading items for the QA forms.

Grader: see → Call Analyst.

Invisible queue: a queue that is defined in QueueMetrics but cannot be chosen from the front page. Useful for queue → wildcard matching.

IVR (Interactive voice response) is a dialog system that allows Asterisk to detect keypad inputs and address the caller to the correct queue or department.

Jabber: see → XMPP.

Manager interface: a TCP/IP Asterisk interface, where a process with the right credentials can connect to a remote Asterisk server over the network and control or query its behaviour. Must be enabled manually by the Asterisk administrator.

Monitoring: in Asterisk terminology, the act of recording to disk.

Outbound queue: see → Campaign.

Queue: the call distribution object that let Asterisk keep callers waiting and distributes them in the correct order to available agents. Each caller is processed on a first-come-first-server basis.

Subqueue: an artifact of QueueMetrics qloaderd that lets you see different calls processed by the same physical Asterisk queue "as if" they were processed on multiple subqueues. Often used e.g. to tag calls to clients or products without creating hundreds of physical queues in Asterisk.

VNC: a technology that can display the screen of another computer on your own screen through a TCP/IP connection. A number of free and commercial VNC implementations exist.

Wildcard matching: a technique to group together all queues that have a name sharing similar characteristics. See Using wildcards in queue names for details.

XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol): An open instant messaging protocol. Used for off-band communication in the AGAW subsystem.