Patent ID: 7987275

Claim:
A system comprising: at least one computer-readable memory medium tangibly embodying a computer program; and at least one digital processing apparatus which in response to execution of the computer program is configured to implement at least the following: a chat application proxy component configured to control access by users to a chat application providing access to help desk services using a plurality of agents, the chat application proxy component configured to implement, as part of the chat application proxy component, a user-facing chat application that provides a graphical user interface to the users, wherein the users interact with the user-facing chat application and the plurality of agents interact with the chat application, the chat application proxy component further configured to route, based on a ticket identification, a chat request from a given user for a new chat session to a selected one of the agents if no previously existing chat session existed between the given user and the selected agent and to reestablish, based on the ticket identification, a previously existing chat session between the given user and the selected agent by routing the request for the new chat session to the selected agent, wherein the ticket identification corresponds to a ticket previously created for help desk services and configured to store at least a chat transcript between the given user and the selected agent; and a chat application wrapper component configured to manage communication between the chat application proxy component and the chat application, wherein the chat application is external to both the chat application proxy component and the chat application wrapper component, and wherein the chat application wrapper component manages communication at least by maintaining a mapping between a session identification used by the chat application proxy component and chat application parameters and by using the session identification to communicate with the chat application, wherein the chat application proxy component is further configured to implement a routing path through the chat application wrapper component and the chat application, to route chat communications between users and agents through the routing path, to implement a media path outside the routing path and between the chat application proxy component and at least one of the plurality of agents, to route multimedia over the media path and between a user and the at least one chat agent.