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SOA/WEB SERVICES FEATURE ARTICLES


April 10, 2006

Etta�s Portal: A Real-World SOA Application

By Alan Rosenberg, BlueNote Networks


I don’t know about you, but here at BlueNote we talk to our partners. Sure, we share business processes with them, and as part of those business processes we talk to them. In addition, we listen to them. From time to time, we get to see them. No matter how you slice it, interacting with our partners is integral to our business processes. I think it is central to many people’s business processes.
 
The issue at hand is that for all the technology we put in place to build our partner applications, we often forget that, although transmitting data is a necessary part of the business process, alone it’s not sufficient. For example, writing this article is a business process.
 
The process involves a PR firm, the editor, our company’s marketing manager (Etta) and the author (me). There are schedules that need to be coordinated, approvals for the messages we want to communicate and logistics to be arranged. In the end, it is much more interactive than word processing and emailing the final document. Today this process involves calendar coordination, looking for proper contact information, reaching the proper contacts, getting the proper approvals, and arranging at least one conference call.
 
I have seen Etta rooting through emails and Outlook contacts just for phone numbers - not to mention herding the cats once the article is ready for review. This is a business process that would benefit from a service-oriented architecture that has integrated the interactive communication tools she needs to streamline her communications.
 
Etta needs a portal. However, not just any portal. Etta’s Portal is really a telecommunication system masquerading as an extranet partner portal. To create Etta’s Portal, I will create for her a traditional “data application” portal, complete with email, calendar, and file sharing integration, and I’ll use all the tools available in the enterprise to do it.
 
But I’ll add one twist; I’ll incorporate an interactive communication platform (software which offers voice, video and interactive communications to the SOA as a service) into the portal.
 
What happens when the business process is integrated with the interactive communication tools available to the enterprise? One simple and extremely powerful paradigm shift – I take the burden of how to reach me off the calling party.
 
Imagine a portal that Etta shares with me, our PR firm, the editor, and the marketing team here at BlueNote. Web-based, use a browser, interworking with our local telecom services, calls over the PSTN, yadda, yadda, yadda; everything you’d expect.
 
By incorporating an interactive communication platform into the architecture used to build the portal, all the participants can reach out and touch someone. I don’t need to let our PR firm know how to contact me, I control that through the portal, and they use the portal to initiate communication. I may need to be reached via my cell phone, but Etta doesn’t need to know that – she could just use the portal, and the interactive communication platform will do the rest. Clicking on my link in the portal calls me.
 
That’s all the portal user needs to know. Consider voice-mail “accounts” that are project based. Why can’t voice-mail be sorted by “subject” just as email is? Bringing the interactive communication system into the world of the portal allows the portal software to direct the voice-mail system where to put the message. Try doing that with your PBX.
 
What about conference calls? Stop dialing in to conference calls, why isn’t the portal calling you? Shouldn’t the portal and your telecom system work together to reach you? It’ll make Etta’s life a whole lot more productive as she doesn’t need to know how to reach me; she has Etta’s Portal.
 
Things get really interesting when you consider an eco-system of business processes in the enterprise. The reachability of one person may differ based on the business process. It’s intuitive once you consider it, and it happens all the time. I’m reachable by BlueNote’s sales staff in different and more flexible ways than I am our marketing team because I’ve put a priority on our customers.
 
My practice for customer processes is different from my practice for marketing processes and it’s imperative that our business processes help us define, control, and leverage these differences. The sales team might get a portal. Integrating interactive communication with the CRM tools our sales team uses today creates, for their needs, a telecommunication system just like Etta’s.
 
If you think for a moment about how you use email, you might begin to see the power that Etta’s Portal brings to telecom. If you’re like me, you have a work-email address and a personal-email address. Email addressed with your work-email address goes to an Exchange server in the datacenter. Your personal-email goes to Yahoo! or Google (News - Alert) or wherever. You may read your work email via Outlook or Outlook Web Access; you may read your personal email via POP3 or IMAP or via Web-mail access. You may mix these based on where you are, and what facilities you have access to.
 
For example, in an Internet Café you’ll use Web access for everything, but if you’re in the office, you might mix Outlook and Web access. In the end, you’ve created your own personal email system from accessible services.
 
Etta’s Portal represents the same flexibility for telecom. So, if you’re like me you have a cellphone and a desk-phone. Calls to your desk-phone are connected via your office phone system; calls to your cellphone are connected via the cellular network. You may mix these technologies as I do at home (my cellphone is forwarded to my home phone - POTS, but could be Vonage (News - Alert) - due to bad cell coverage and I login to our office  telecom system using a softphone).
 
You may be reachable via the cellular network while waiting in the airport or you may be reachable via VoIP once you’re in your hotel room; or you may want all available devices to ring – just in case you have no idea where you’ll be or what address, err … number, can be used to reach you. This control and management of your telecom service is hidden from the users of Etta’s Portal by the integration of the communication platform into the service-oriented architecture.
 
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Brian Silver is chief technology officer with BlueNote Networks, which is pioneering the collision of SIP-based interactive communications with service-oriented architectures (SOA) by delivering the first enterprise-class interactive communication platform: SessionSuite™. He can be reached at [email protected]

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