On Mon, Jul 24, 2000 at 09:52:42AM -0700, rusty wrote:
> I've got a situation that i need help with in order to avoid
> using NT or some other M$-Non-OS.
>  
> We need to have a list of stuff (names and phone numbers) presented
> to the person.  They either dial the phone number or (if its not too
> much work right now) click on the number and have the computer
> dial it.  After they are done talking, they need to enter one
> of a (limited, pre-selected (probably for now)) status codes.
>  
> I'd really like to do this using Linux, but don't have time
> to write such an application.  I'm hoping there's something
> nice out there that would make this kinda thing pretty easy
> to do using like mySQL or such.  Web based would probably
> work ok too...
>  
> any ideas anyone?  (I'll even take volunteers or maybe even
> otherwise)

nettebook can handle the contact management part.  Right now you can
"record" a conversation by taking notes and it will store the start
and end times.  You could put in a code in the "conversation" table
I suppose... but I'm not sure if it would be a generally useful feature
beyond your case.  Maybe.  Or, maybe the more general solution would
be to have a drop-down list of your most-used comments, and it would
still be stored as text, but you wouldn't have to type it over and 
over.

As for dialing the phone, it doesn't do that yet but it would be easy.
I have successfully called shell scripts from PHP (for printing, mostly)
so I could add "dial" buttons next to phone numbers and have it call
a "dial" shell script which takes the number, and it would simply
echo ATDT<number> > /dev/ttyS3
or something like that.  'Course, a modem expects to connect when you
do that so maybe it would take some other codes to tell it not to try,
just dial and then hang up.  Or not hang up... depending on whether it's
worse to have the "click" when it hangs up, or the audio loss caused by
two loads on the same line (the modem and your phone).  Or with a voice
modem, you could even record the conversation if you like.  Or use the
voice modem as a speakerphone.

nettebook already has "mailmerge"... maybe it should have "phone-merge".  
You could assign a set of people to a group, and then auto-dial everyone 
in the group in order... click one button to dial, get a text field to
take notes, click a button to submit that and hang up, and then it would
give you a button to dial the next person.

Nettebook is at www.nettebook.org (and the current version is a bit
out of date... I've added a few features since then).

-- 
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