Exotel is one of Asia's largest cloud communication platforms. Our aim is to help businesses, both large and small, manage their customer communication via a virtual phone system. Exotel's business phone system eliminates the need to invest in any hardware or maintenance. And that is one of the biggest pain points of traditional systems like EPABX/PBX.

Authenticating

Exotel uses API Key based auth, a developer-friendly delegated access protocol. Quolum has already connected the necessary wires with Exotel. Using a sequence of click-throughs, your organization's administrator allows Quolum to make API calls to Exotel without getting access to passwords.

Step 1: Initiate a connection to Exotel

Click the Connect button from the Connections card. If you are not an admin, you can invite your organization's Exotel admin to make a connection to your Exotel organization account. When you click on the Connect button, the web browser will navigate to the Exotel login page.

Step 2: Log in to Exotel

Log in to Exotel using your organization's credentials. The exact login mechanism may depend on your Exotel plan, and the sign-in mechanism used. You may have corporate SSO such as Azure AD, GSuite, or Okta along with multi-factor authentication. Once you have successfully logged-in you can find the API Key and API Secret as mentioned below in Step 3.

Step 3: Back to Quolum

Once you have granted access to Quolum, Exotel is going to send you back to Quolum's page in Step 1, where you started. The Connect button on the Connections card would now say Reconnect. Reconnect is used to reauthenticate under circumstances where the access has expired.

Under the hood

Using the OAuth protocol, Quolum now has delegated access to your Exotel Workspace. The Quolum server, running on Amazon AWS VPC, will be able to make API calls and retrieve feature-level utilization of projects, stories, and tasks. Later, this data is crunched and available for visualization on the Quolum dashboard.