Sometimes it's the little things...

11/15/2007 10:31 PM by Chris Toohey

It's often laziness - not necessity - that is the mother of invention. Or, that's often the case for me at least. I was chatting with a telephony guy today after having to go through about 30 tickets - calling the point-of-contact for each reported issue and whatnot (it was a long day). Now, the motion became pretty automated after ticket 4 or so - Double-click with my right hand, dial the phone number with my left hand, fingers back on home row to take notes, etc.

Now, about half-way through, I though there's gotta be a way to speed things up - I was sick of dialing these 10+ digit phone numbers (I know - lazy, but it was getting frustrating I tell ya!). So, I talked with our telephony admin, asking him if the Cisco-based phone system had some sort of API that I could write to in order to speed things up a little.

After about 15 minutes, I had a new SmartIcon that would use Cisco's Web Dialer to auto-dial the selected/highlighted/open document's OfficePhoneNumber. Really simple stuff here - a simple @Prompt([OKCancelEdit].../@URLOpen(... - combo gets the job done in very short order.

I bring this up not because I think that the code is anything amazing - it's two lines if I want to be verbose - but it's the addressing a pretty simple need with a pretty simple solution that gives you a really slick interoperability between two technology investments. Sometimes it's the little things that really show off just how cool the technology is and what it's capable of.