CEA Impact Sessions

In case you are looking to learn more about Communications Enabled Applications (CEA) at Impact, here are some talks you can come into:
Enabling Cobrowsing and Coshopping on your website - 2040A Tue, 4/May 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM Venetian - San Polo 3506
Adding Rich Interaction Support to your Enterprise Application - 2272A Wed, 5/May  10:15 AM - 11:30 AM Venetian - Lido 3103

Also, we have a lab on Enabling Coshopping and Two Way Forms on your Web Applications with CEA - 2027A Tue, 4/May 04:45 PM - 06:00 PM Venetian - Murano 3304

Finally, here is a less than 3 minute video showing cobrowsing and the new mobile widgets we have made available and will be demoing at Impact here as a tech preview

Adding Value with Communications Enabled Applications

Here is a video explaining three scenarios in which the Communications Enabled Applications Feature Pack can be used to add value to your applications and website.



This video covers three scenarios:

1) Adding CEA functions to a retail website which enables the customer to:

• Click to make a call to a customer service representative
  
• Cobrowse through the website with the customer service representative
  
• Cobrowse with a friend through the website

2) Adding CEA functions to an insurance website

• Use two way forms to help customers fill out forms and drive more forms to completion.

3) Using CEA within an inventory management system

• Let the application drive calls between buyers and suppliers through the make a call web services or REST services.

If nothing else, its a very entertaining video!

Introducing Feature Packs and the CEA Feature Pack

Here is a quick video I had missed the opportunity to blog about when it first came out talking about our WebSphere Application Server Feature Packs and the Communications Enabled Applications Feature Pack.

Using CEA Services - Inventory Management example

We have spent a lot of time talking about how to use our CEA Web 2.0 widget features in WebSphere to communications enable your website but there certainly are several other use cases we have provided for. Overall, we are providing three main access points to help communications enable your applications. We provide the Web 2.0 widgets, REST like services, and web services. I wanted to blog in more depth about the CEA services that are available in WebSphere.

First, we have a REST like service. I say REST like because while we tried to follow the REST semantics as much as possible, it definitely made more sense to build some level of affinity logic into the service to tie a HTTP request to a specific server which is participating in the telephony side of the conversation. To build a similar system stateless would have been much more challenging and not perform as well. The service however does use the REST semantics. The verbs are still HTTP methods, PUT, POST, GET, and DELETE and at the root of the URLs are nouns. The REST services use either encoded URLs or Cookies for affinity. These services either send back data in JSON or XML formats depending on which is easiest for the consumer to handle. Here is a great in depth article on the REST services in the Communications Enabled Applications Feature Pack.

Second we have web services. As I stated above, we have challenges with having affinity for these services and needing a call back mechanism in order to get updates about the call state. We used WS-Adressing to deal with the affinity issues by having specially encoded end point references which tie the web services to a backend SIP session talking to your telephony infrastructure. We also use WS-Notification as a way to send updates about a particular call state.
Here is a good reference usage of using the web services to make a phone call.

So, how can these be used? Well, one example as briefly talked about in the video above is in an inventory management system. When the inventory begins to run low, a call could be made between the buyer and supplier using web services so that more stock could be ordered. This could be in addition to sending the appropriate message to the buyer letting them know what is low, what needs ordered, and the account information for the supplier. Now, this scenario could also be handled through REST integration or even using the widgets, it really just depends where the right place in your existing application is to plug in communications.

Retailers need WebSphere CEA

There have been so many times lately that I have been realizing that websites need the WebSphere CEA features and functions. Recently my wife was shopping online and trying to send me links and describe over instant messaging what she was seeing. It was painful and we finally decided we would hold off until later that evening. We forgot that night and looked again at it a day later. That was a sale that was almost lost. Actually, to be honest, the sale was lost...but had we had peer to peer cobrowsing on that site we may have purchased it that first day.

I have also had the experience many times when buying gifts where I knew nothing about the subject matter and had to call a company or visit their store. Whether it was custom jewelry I bought my wife for mother's day or shopping for something for my own mother, there are times I just need more information than I can find online.

After talking to a major US retail company the past couple of days it became evident that our CEA functions when shown were much more amazing. This is why I made the video above, to show this typical experience I have when shopping for something and I need help. But the ability to shop with a friend brings a whole new experience to online shopping and could help drive another boost to online commerce sites. Below I have shown a video describing how that interaction might work.

There are other major areas when seeing something online would be useful when on the phone. For example, last year it was apparent our credit card info was stolen and had to call into Chase and describe the transactions that were invalid. We could have saved time if I could have shown them which transactions through a couple of clicks rather than describing them. But security is a constraint...can you show your customer information without security? How about without a plugin? The CEA FEP does this with security, using the application's current security model. There is no plugin, its all Javascript. It requires some new thinking - but not necessarily new code. :-) We'll talk more about secure cobrowsing soon...

Web communications enhancing interactions

One of the common questions as people are learning about our WebSphere Communications Enabled Applications (CEA) function is if we are trying to replace interactions with "real people" when they see features such as the cobrowsing. The real idea behind CEA is using an interactions via the web to enhance real time communications which could be phone calls or instant messaging. There are several scenarios that we try to show in the demo video below, but here are some of the common issues that a web based interaction could solve in a contact center:

Click to Call:

• Increase efficiency by removing the need for people to type in phone numbers they see on a web site.
  
• Help a user connect to the most relevant help based on what page they are on without having to traverse a voice based menu system.
  
• Provide the backend contact center with relevant user information from their web session.
  

Contact Center Cobrowsing

• Help explain complex data to customers which may be too difficult to describe. Some examples include mortgage closing costs, insurance policy details, order information, financial transaction details, or product information. Customers could print or save the information which could result in them not having to transcribe what the contact center representative is saying.
  
• Teach a customer how to use a specific site rather than just telling them an answer so that they may not need to call again for a similar issue.
  

Two way forms

• Allows a customer to visually verify information rather than waiting for the contact center representative to repeat it. For example, a misspelled last name can take time, cause problems looking up information in the future, and decrease customer satisfaction. Two way forms allows the customer to visually verify what the contact center representative has entered.
  
• Either party in the session could fill out some fields which, if it makes more sense for the customer to do it, can increase efficiency.
  
• Some vital data like Social Security Numbers or Account/Credit Card numbers could be entered by the customer and obfuscated to the contact center representative reducing the risk of critical information being misused.
  

All of these scenarios are in the context of a real time communications session like a phone call. Here is a demo we have shown in the past showing these features in a contact center scenario. Download the beta now from the link on the right hand column and try the application shown below yourself.

Extending the CEA Cobrowsing feature

The widgets in our Communications Enabled Applications Feature Pack are very extendable. When we first created it, we thought of many ways to extend those widgets. Below is one example I have...


In that video, I talked about adding basic instant messaging to the cobrowsing window. Inserted in that interview was a recorded usage of our WebSphere Commerce sample we showed at Impact where our WebSphere Commerce team integrated the CEA cobrowsing functionality into their sample store and then extended the cobrowsing Web 2.0 widget with instant messaging support. For a javascript developer, adding this function on top of our existing cobrowsing function would take just a couple of days.

Over time on our blog here we plan to post descriptions and sample code as to how you would do these sorts of extensions to help further a rich communications experience over multiple modalities. For now, if you have some great ideas on what else we could be adding into the cobrowsing scenario please comment here, tweet @burckart, or send me an email to ejburcka at us dot ibm dot com. We will consider these for future blogs or releases!

Contact Center Demo of CEA function

Here is another homemade demonstration of the WebSphere Application Server Communications Enabled Applications function in a Contact Center environment. Here we have our call notification widget, click to call widget, and contact center cobrowsing functionality embedded in our Plants by WebSphere sample application.



Savio wrote more about how these Contact Center scenarios can play out here. Also, the widgets have some further detail here in a blog I wrote. Finally, if you are at IBM Impact this week, check out our 10:30 AM Session in Murano 3205 entitled "Lower Costs, Improve Satisfaction with Communications-Enabled Applications." And, more importantly, ask us questions while there!

Peer to Peer cobrowsing in retail makes for a real coshopping experience?

A couple of days ago, Savio wrote more about utilizing our peer to peer cobrowsing functionality. Today at Impact 2009, we demonstrated WebSphere Commerce utilizing the peer to peer cobrowsing widget to allow for a coshopping environment. In this, Daisy Tan extended the cobrowsing functionality to add instant messaging into a Commerce deployment so that users of that could cobrowse and instant message with one another in the cobrowsing modal window. Perhaps I will get a demo of that integration up later, but for now here is a homemade video of the peer to peer cobrowsing with the sample provided in the feature pack. This shows a simple scenario for coshopping within the application. Our demonstration could have been just as easily a travel planning application, insurance benefits application, or any number of applications allowing two people to view a similar page and use the web as another communication modality. Check it out and let us know what you think! (aside from the fact that I am obviously not a professional voiceover guy or video editor ;-) )

Widgets in the CEA Feature Pack

Here is a quick rundown of some of the Web 2.0 widgets in our CEA Feature Pack:




Click to call- the ability to send a message into our REST service for it to make a phone call between two parties. This widget needs two phone numbers, one for the callee and one for the caller. The caller can be specified by the user of the widget and the callee can be embedded. The widget could also be easily extended to pull the caller information from another source.


Call Notifications - the ability communicate with our REST service to monitor a phone for caller ID type information. This widget needs the phone number to monitor, which could have been entered or pushed through an extension to the javascript.

Collaboration Dialog - this is a modal window which controls the sharing of information between two peers. There are some basic send and receive event semantics around this widget that allow extensions to send and receive various pieces of data.


Contact Center Cobrowsing - when a caller enters through our click to call widget and the callee enters through the call notification widget, the two users are able to launch a collaboration dialog that has the ability to have a controlled browsing session between the two peer users. This is described and demonstrated in detail in the video above.


Peer to Peer cobrowsing - has the ability to create a link which allows two users to enter a cobrowsing session without being involved with the telephony widgets. One user creates the link and sends it to the other via some method such as instant messaging or email. Since this link is created via a REST service, there could be some intelligence in a site which includes this sort of interaction without the widgets involved. Once the link is entered on the peer user's side, the two users can enter a collaborative cobrowsing session.



Two Way Forms - allows you to take a dojo dijit style form and augment it to have a writer and reader side on various fields. This is handy when one side must review the correctness of the data the other side is entering. The video above shows this flow even more.