One of our
delivery channels interacts with Office Communications
Server. It's basically Windows
Communicator. If you are using OCS within
your organization, you can have one of
these nice little alerts show up via the
Communicator. And you can have multiple show up
at once if you have got three
notifications, you will stack up three different conversations
at once. It's fairly robust. So let's
take a look at how this actually works, or how this is
configured. The first thing you are going to have to
do is download this Office Communications
Service plug-in from our tech support site. It is
not part of the standard install. But download it
from our tech support site and then run that installation. And you
should see that you have a new delivery channel. Let me show you
that again. I am in Tools-- this is under the Notifications
section-- Tools, Notifications, Settings. And
if I go into delivery channels, you can see all of the current
plug-ins. And these are the two that
shipped with the system. This is the one that we just downloaded
and installed. You do have to configure
it for communicating with your
Office Communications Server. So if you are not the guy who
is really familiar with all of that, get them involved at
this point. You will find more information about this-- it's
a separate document-- it's not in the regular notifications
document. But you will get this with the download, it's
the delivery channel user guide for OCS. So
use that as a reference to figure out how
you are going to configure this. And
that's obviously something that you only need to do
once. Now I want to point out a couple of different
things that are taking place with this
OCS plug-in here. First of all, the users
who are actually going to receive these communications
down here, they do not have to install anything. They are
just going to have to be running
Communicator. We do have an application that we
install called the Office Communication Server, the OCS
Relay Service, that maintains the communications
with Office Communication Server with the Microsoft
component. That maintains that connection
and then this plug-in here, the one we
just saw, this is what
communicates with that OSC Relay Service. So it's doing
that via Web Services. That is sending
information to that other application which in turn
is communicating with Office Communication
Server. Now once you have made sure you have configured this
properly and you have installed the plug-in, now it's time to create
a delivery end-point. Typically we are
going to be doing this with Active Directory
Contacts. They typically
have communicator accounts. So I will give you an
example. I will go out and I will do a
search for-- this is one of the users
we have been using during this exercise
here. It's Solution B. Smith, that's an Active Directory
user. What I would like to do is add
another delivery channel for that user. So this is
going to go, instead of to his e-mail, it's going to go to Communicator--
his instance of Communicator. The system
is smart enough to take a look at the
present status of this B. Smith
and if he is not there, if he is busy or
unavailable, it will not send this.
Basically it will only send it if he is available. So let me go
ahead and add a new delivery end point.
This time the
delivery end point is going to be this
OCS. So I will
just call this BSmith
via Communicator.
Now as we have seen with all of our other
notification mechanisms, there is a variety of
choices as to exactly how this behaves. For
example, do we send him a message both
when it triggers and also
when it closes-- you can do that with this check-box.
Is there any kind of a retry
interval? Is there a maximum number of those retries?
The purpose of this is to simply give you some flexibility
there. And of course you are required to put in a
SIP address, typically
the same as their e-mail address.
So technically it can be something different, but
that is typically what we see with Active Directory and Office
Communicator. So this would
SIPSolution_BSmith
@
virtuallabs that is his
e-mail address. Now you can set the
priority and these are
just simply picking up on the instant
messaging priorities that we get
from Microsoft. So those are the priorities that you can
choose. You can choose to limit the amount of conversations
that can go on
at once. Four is probably anybody is ever
going to need. But if we do fire off 4 or 5
things via this notification
end-point, he could find himself with many
conversations going on and you can just throttle that right
there. And this toggles what format we send
it in, and this also allows you to include one of
those acknowledgement links. So if you
recall, with our other notifications,
we have the option to incorporate an acknowledgement into the email
for example. And we are giving that same
option right here. Now the rest of this
is just how you decide whether you are
going to send notifications based on
what their status is. There is no
reason to send it if he is not going to be available to
receive it. And once I am finished with that,
I will go ahead and check this in and then I will make use of it.
I will go ahead and check this
in. OK, now that I have built that new delivery
end-point for BSmith, I can make use of it
by going into these notifications, and adding him as a
subscriber. Now here is a list that has not been
updated. I am going to need to refresh this. Let me just
go ahead and choose refresh. As you can
see now, we see the new delivery end-point.
I go ahead and drag this over and now he
is subscribed at this point. Now
just as we have seen before, you have control over
what we send as a message. You have
got control over what kind of content we send--
do we include the trigger? Do we include an Instant RT WebParts
Trend. Now this in particular, the Instant RT WebParts
Trend are kind of interesting.
That's going to give you full feature
of PI WebParts Trend that
is going to launch in a separate window from the
communicator. Now in addition to launching it into a
separate window, you can also specify that
you have a context pane that appears
within communicator. If you choose
no link, then you will simply just get a message. If you choose
acknowledge, and this is one of the relatively newer
features of Communicator, it's got a little
pane that allows
scripting. And so we can have a scriptable
link that will allow you to do an
acknowledge or an acknowledge with a comment. We also
have support from a
WebPart Trend. So that would give you a Trend within the
Communicator pane itself-- that's going to be the Context
pane within Communicator. So in this case I think I will go ahead and choose that.
Once you have done that, go ahead and check this in.
And now we are ready to demonstrate it.
Now what you are going to see as an end result
is going to be this. This is what the user is going to see on his
screen in the bottom right corner.
It's simply a Communicator message. And when he opens that
up, he's going to be opening this up to show the full
message and he will be able to have this
context pane that he can interact with. This is where he is going
to see that-- that PI WebParts Trend
or the acknowledgement option. I am going to
switch over to a video and you will see what this looks like
live. So as you can see, when this
notification first comes up, because we choose the
context pane, and that context pane
is showing a PI Trend, then we can go ahead and interact with that.
Now if I click on this
instant RT WebParts
Trend, this is going to go ahead and launch a separate
window that is in fact the regular PI WebParts
Trend. So of course it has a lot more functionality.
Now back on this page, you will see that we do have this
acknowledge and acknowledge with comment. If you click there, that's
going to go ahead and launch a separate
place for you to go ahead and do the acknowledgement.
Now one minor point, you are going to notice
Office Communicator Server 2007. It has some pretty steep
requirements, you are going to have to get a 64 bit version of
Windows and that's the same for this
OCS Relay Service.