Transit Desktop Agent
The Transit Desktop Agent is a self-contained software package that runs on the POS host, acting as the mediator between the Transit Transaction Service, connected scanning devices - such as live network scanners, and the host POS software. Distributing "smart" software to the POS host, allows complex customer interaction logic to be reused and enables a number of valuable features discussed below.
The Transit Desktop Agent receives one-time tokens from the live network scanners (as well as our other scanning mechanisms, such as mobile Android scanners) and then resolves these tokens into useful data for the POS system. This might include customer identifiers for use in a loyalty program, metadata about an intended action - such as promotion redemption or point burning, as well as any other useful metadata a merchant or third party system would like to expose for use during a transaction. The Transit Desktop Agent exposes this to the POS software via a direct integration, or leveraging the zero-integration keyboard emulation exposed by the live network scanners.
Installation
The Transit Desktop Agent is distributed for all major operating systems and architectures and distributed as either an installer or direct executable, configured to connect to the local, self-hosted Transit nodes or to the broader Transaction Network via a Transit API. In production deployments the Transit Agent does not need to be installed directly since the is managed by the kx Process Manager.
On boot, the Transit Desktop Agent discovers the connected live network scanners and configures itself against the local Transit node or the Transit API, providing centralised control, update distribution and maintenance of the Transit Merchant Network with an automated "configure and forget" approach to distribution. The Transit Desktop Agent performs version enforcement on connected scanning devices, ensuring the scanner is up-to-date as well as configured to the policy requirements of the merchant.
When deep integration with a merchant POS system is preferred, our solution engineers work closely with merchants to adapt the Transit Desktop Agent to fit their environment - performing programatic integration with the merchant POS system.