VisitorChat – PHP Chat with Web- & Windows Clients (Help and Support Tools)

Visitor Demo: http://visitorchat-demo.clientengage.com/contents/demo
Admin Demo: http://visitorchat-demo.clientengage.com/login

The ClientEngage Visitor Chat is a fully-featured real-time chat for your websites. A clear and simple web-based administration allows you to conveniently
chat with your visitors. And best of all: Visitor Chat comes with a Windows-based client out-of-the-box. Without having to visit the Visitor Chat’s
admin-interface you will be notified from your Windows tray and can start chatting straight away!

By including one single snippet of JavaScript, this interactive and engaging Chat can be used on any website – whether you are using WordPress, Joomla! or
plain HTML.

Functionality Description of ClientEngage Visitor Chat

Functionality Overview

Fully-Featured Chat for your Website

Non-intrusive chat for your websites
Clear administrator chat-interface
View additional metadata of your visitors (pages they are on, referrers, and more)
Unlimited number of administrators
Easy to translate

Windows-based client included

Don’t want to keep a browser window open all day long?
You are notified of new visitors in real-time and can start chatting straight through the Windows-based client
The chat disappears to your system tray until you have a visitor opening the chat

Adaptable Templates & Translations

Have a chat that fully blends with the look and feel of your website
Comes with four pre-defined colour schemes
You can create an unlimited number of new chat styles and you have full control over the CSS
All visitor-facing texts can be easily changed

Easy Integration & Use

Simple copy & paste integration of your feedback survey into any website: just copy a brief JavaScript code into
the respective site’s HTML template
Automated installation script – no extensive knowledge of PHP/MySQL necessary
Detailed handbook with installation & use instructions
Extensible: the system is developed with the CakePHP MVC framework and features a clean architecture. This means that, if you have
web-development experience, the system is easily extensible

Multilingual Interface

ClientEngage Visitor Chat was built with internationalisation in mind: currently, you can select from British and American English as well as German.

System Requirements

In order to be able to use ClientEngage Visitor Chat, you must fulfil the following system requirements:

Apache 2 HTTP Server
Preferably with mod_rewrite enabled
PHP with a version of greater than PHP 5.2.8
MySQL with a version of greater than MySQL 5 (i.e. with InnoDB support)
Preferably a subdomain/domain for use with ClientEngage Visitor Voice
Safe mode: off
Enough server-resources for the number of concurrent chatters you expect
Finally, the PHP PDO extensions have to be installed

System requirements of the Windows-based client

.NET4 Framework (will be installed if not already available)
Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8

A note on server performance

This chat system employs AJAX technologies and does not rely on WebSockets for its communication. This means that anyone can run Visitor Chat, as long as your server fulfils the requirements outlined below. However, this also means that this system is not intended for heavy-duty use: so don’t build the next Facebook and try to have 10m people use this at once. That being said, on average server-specifications, there is nothing stopping you from having 10-15 concurrent conversations.

A note on chat-styles

The chat looks beautiful across all modern platforms and browsers.
However, the chat-box may look “out of place” if you have CSS styles on your website that affect whole tags (such as “div {margin:50px;}” or “span {padding:50px;}”).
In such cases, you may have to edit the Chat-Style for that particular website to override your styles.

Changelog

22/04/2013: 
    - Public release of ClientEngage Visitor Voice v1.0.1

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