Getting Started with Cisco SocialMiner

Here are some answers to some common questions that you might have about Cisco SocialMiner.

Q: How does SocialMiner find postings?
A: SocialMiner is designed to search the Internet for customer postings which are referred to in SocialMiner as "Social Contacts". SocialMiner will use standard search interfaces to query and standard results formats to capture results. For example, many social media sites support OpenSearch and RSS or ATOM to return results.

Q: What is the SocialMiner packaging?
A: SocialMiner is packaged as a virtual machine appliance. The operating system (Linux), the application software, and the database are all bundled together in a VMWare virtual machine. Larger deployments may have a cluster of SocialMiner virtual machines. The specific hardware requirements for SocialMiner will depend on deployment size.

Q: Does SocialMiner require depend on any other Cisco components?
A: It depends on the functionality that you are using. You can deploy Cisco SocialMiner for multi-channel handling with Cisco Unified Contact Center Express and in this configuration, Contact Center Express and Cisco Finesse are required components.

With Contact Center Enterprise, Cisco SocialMiner is a stand-alone component

Q: What is the SocialMiner user interface?
A: All of the SocialMiner user interface elements are implemented as OpenSocial Gadgets. The SocialMiner system will install with a built-in OpenSocial gadget container to control layout and look-and-feel for the gadgets. The combination of the gadgets plus container provides a complete thin-client user interface for SocialMiner. SocialMiner Gadgets can also run inside of Cisco Finesse.

It should also be possible to run the SocialMiner gadgets in any standard OpenSocial gadget container. The gadget source code will be open-source, so customizations will be possible.


Q: How does SocialMiner Queue/Assign Postings?
A: SocialMiner will have several ways to distribute social postings or work. Note: in some cases interested parties may want to just look/see the postings. In other cases, there may be staff (or systems) assigned to handle/respond to the postings. It is not clear at this point what options will be available in what timeframe but the following list provides the choices in likely order of availability:

• RSS publication. SocialMiner can publish Social Contacts as an RSS feed allowing anybody to subscribe using a RSS reader
• Campaign Results Gadget. SocialMiner present the Social Contacts in a list gadget allowing users to do "pick" type assignments whereby users select the work to handle