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 purpose.

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.

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.