EPiServer .NET CMS Adds Skype Integration

By Brice Dunwoodie (@cmswire) Sep 9, 2005

Swedish Web CMS vendor, ElektroPost, today announced the addition of a Skype-based visitor interaction module for their popular Web Content Management product. The new module, the EPiServer Webchat will be sold as an add-on base content management system.

Presence dependent chat links on the EPiServer web pages will bring-up web chats that are transformed into Skype text messages. This allows groups such as internal sales teams to use Skype as the client program. EpiServer will act as a proxy, passing messages between the web chat and the Skype user, and will include the ability to log all chat conversations for future reference and record keeping.

“Skype is a very good infrastructure to use as a backbone for presence and messaging, since Skype has a public API allowing software vendors like ourselves to enhance our systems with messaging without the need to install additional software on the clients” says Mikael Runhem, Founder of ElektroPost.

The Webchat module allows you to display different buttons on various web pages, depending on the presence of, for example, a sales team. When members of the team are online, the website can dynamically reflect this by displaying different styles of chat buttons.

For example, if no one is online, the button can change to “Email a Sales Representative” instead of “Chat with a Sales Representative”.

Additional features include workload distribution through groups and a “tripwire” functions that notifies a certain Skype user when a given page is visited. Tripwire allows a front office Skype user to initiate a web chat with the visitor, answering sales questions etc.

Finally, visitor interaction can also be enhanced with the voice capabilities, assuming the visitor is one of the 50 million users that have a Skype client.