Contact Center Enterprise supports 3 monitoring methods: desktop, SPAN and UCM-based. All three are supported by CTI OS desktops as well as CAD desktops. CAD and CTI OS each have their own implementation of the first two methods.
Monitoring using one of the first two methods is initiated from the (CTI OS or CAD) supervisor desktop and the audio is intercepted by the (CTI OS or CAD) agent desktop when using the first method or by the (CTI OS or CAD) monitoring server when using SPAN monitoring; the audio is terminated at the (CTI OS or CAD) supervisor desktop (i.e. at the PC).
A monitoring session using the 3rd method is initiated from the (CTI OS or CAD) supervisor desktop in the same way as the first two methods, and the audio is sent by UCM to the supervisor IP Phone.
Which monitoring method is used depends on configuration and available monitoring servers.
For agent desktops running in Citrix any of these three methods can be used. In order to use the desktop method with Citrix, a CTI OS monitoring service needs to be installed on the PC connected to the phone (same PC as where the Citrix client runs). If this is not possible (e.g. when the PC is not a Windows machine, or when CAD is used), the UCM (preferred) or SPAN method must be used.
For a Mobile Agent only the SPAN method is available (desktop monitoring doesn't work as there is no IP Phone to intercept the traffic from; the UCM method doesn't work as there is no IP Phone to bridge the media streams).
Contact center Express only supports CAD-based desktop or SPAN-based monitoring. It does not support UCM-based monitoring.
Hope this answers most questions raised here. A white paper and presentation material on this topic will be posted on cisco.com within a few weeks.
Willem Evert, Cisco CCBU Product Management.
