Our secretary at the front desk has had up until recently 2 computers and one monitor. Computer A is her regular workstation and Computer B was a workstation reserved only for scanning purchase orders via a scanner connected to Computer B. This secretary was able to use a KVM switch to switch between the two computers and do both her regular job and also do purchase order scanning. She also used a separate phone switchboard to take and route calls coming in.
This system worked fine for her until now.
We have upgraded our phone system to a Cisco Call Manager VoIP system. The secretary now instead of having a separate switchboard for calls now has a 2nd monitor connected to Computer A that only shows the Call manager screen. The problem she is having is that when she uses the KVM to switch to Computer B to do scanning, she cannot switch to the 2nd monitor connected to Computer A to transfer a call UNLESS she uses the KVM switch to switch the first monitor BACK to Comptuer A first.
Confused yet? I didn’t get the problem until I saw it for myself.
What I’m basically asking is… does anyone know of a good way to manage this setup so that she can easily do her scans and still manage calls on the 2nd monitor? Ideally she would like her primary monitor to be switchable between computers A and B while the 2nd monitor is always on the call manager. She would also like to be able to freely move her mouse between both screens, no matter which computer she is on in the primary monitor.
Put the phone system on 1 dedicated monitor with its own mouse, assuming she does not need to type to answer/route a call. KVM the other two. That way she can work and route calls or scan and route calls.
She should use VNC or the Microsoft equivalent (remote desktop or some such). This will let here switch between the various computersm all through software. We use these all the time at work to get to lab computers from our offices.
If I understand it correctly he is trying to avoid interrupting other tasks to answer a call.
Might be a good time to pick up another basic machine just for the phone system. Toss in a touch screen and you wont even need a mouse/keyboard for it.
She can have the VNC window in one monitor and the scanner stuff in the other monitor. This will work with a computer with two monitors. I do this sort of thing all the time. The lab computer and the linux boxes where simulations are running are on one monitor and my office computer is on the other. I move the mouse pointer from one to the other. Works great lasts a long time.
Basically I have two or more computers on one monitor and my office computer on the other.
You need an office computer that supports two monitors for this to work.
But if you do go down the seperate keyboard & mouse route, one tip: colour code them, one black, one beige. Make everything for the telephone system one colour, make the existing system another.
It’s lean, cheap, easy to use, and highly configurable. That’s pretty much everything I look for in an app. Just zip your pointer off the screen in whichever direction you want and voila! It and your keyboard are off and running on a different system. Supports up to seven different systems.
This looks like a commercial version of Synergy, which is open source. I think I can get a working solution with one of those products. I will take at both of them and see what I can come up with.
Thank you all for your help. Once again the Teeming Millions rock!