Contents

• Best Practices
• Centralized Ownership and Administration
• Dashboard design
• Refresh rate
• Data Source Access Across WAN
• Unified Intelligence Center Server Access Across WAN
• Report Design
• Browser Client for Reports
• Scheduled Reports

Best Practices

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The following are a brief collection of recommendations or best practices, which if you follow while deploying Unified Intelligence Center, provide the optimal operation of the application.

This chapter contains the following topics:

• Centralized Ownership and Administration
• Dashboard design
• Refresh rate
• Data Source Access Across WAN
• Unified Intelligence Center Server Access Across WAN
• Report Design
• Browser Client for Reports
• Scheduled Reports

Centralized Ownership and Administration

The administration and design of Unified Intelligence Center is best left to a centralized team who are responsible for ensuring proper report and dashboard design, as well as managing ongoing system utilization.

Dashboard design

Create targeted dashboards for users and eliminate elements that are not required for those users. Focus dashboard design on just what people need.

Refresh rate

When possible, increase the time between the refresh (increase the refresh rate) to reduce access to the database. By default, realtime reports are set to refresh every 15 seconds, and historical reports are set to refresh every 15 minutes, but each custom report definition can be set to a unique refresh rate.

Data Source Access Across WAN

Unified Intelligence Center nodes should not be using data sources across the WAN. For example, Unified Intelligence Center node on Side A should not access data from data source on Side B, unless explicitly provisioned, as this requires extra WAN bandwidth.

Unified Intelligence Center Server Access Across WAN

Bandwidth calculator does not take into account the amount of bandwidth required to support clients over the WAN. Cisco strongly recommends that Unified Intelligence Center users be local to their Unified Intelligence Center server, otherwise, the Client > Unified Intelligence Center bandwidth must be taken into account. Size the bandwidth required to support clients over the WAN according to the reporting profile being used.

Report Design

Use a lab or a non-production system for report development and testing prior to deployment. Import the finished reports into the production server after testing in the lab environment.

Build reports with an historical summary skill group or call type data rather than with individual agent or call records to optimize database queries. There are fewer records to report on in the summarized forms, which results in improved performance.

For example, whenever possible, use Agent Team reports in Unified CCE deployments instead of Agent reports, if the former can suffice.

Browser Client for Reports

Mozilla Firefox is the preferred client of choice for administrators in scaled deployments, due to the large amount of data that appears. Unified Intelligence Center pages render faster on the Firefox platform.

Scheduled Reports

Identify the reports that are run daily and shared among various users and use the scheduling function in Unified Intelligence Center to send email or update dashboards with this data.

For example: if all managers in a call center require the same Daily Skill Group and Call Type Reports, schedule those reports for email delivery or to update a common dashboard.

Evaluate any reports that require more than 30 seconds to render to determine if you can optimize or schedule the report for a time of lower system use, especially if they access a large amount of data.