Over the last couple of months we’ve been working with colleagues in Learning Services to roll out a “live chat” service allowing students to ask helpdesk staff questions online.
Here’s what it looks like for the student:
And a sneak peak of what the staff interface looks like:
It makes use of an XMPP/Jabber server called Openfire with a plugin called Fastpath that talks to the Spark client installed on staff machines. Fastpath provides a web interface that can be embedded into the Learning Services website.
The service is currently a trial running 11am – 3pm so go along and take a look.