Introduction to CEA

Communications Enabled Applications (CEA) provides the ability to add dynamic Web communications to an application or business process. CEA's two main services are telephony access and multimodal Web interaction.

Telephony access allows you to create a unified communications environment from within business applications to increase the efficiency of processes, reduce communications errors, and optimize business interactions in real time. The feature pack provides telephony access through a REST interface, through a Web services client, and through CEA widgets built using the Dojo toolkit

Multimodal Web interaction allows you to provide session linking (shared sessions) between users browsing the same Web site from different locations. Commerce Web sites can use this service to provide product or customer support, while protecting information on the internal site.

The CEA widgets are built and embedded in applications using the Dojo toolkit (www.dojotolkit.org). Call Notification and Click to Call require an IP private branch exchange (PBX) as part of your infrastructure. An IP-PBX is a business telephone system designed to deliver voice over a data network and interoperate with the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). A sample IP-PBX application is included in with the IBM WebSphere Application Server Feature Pack for CEA installation. The sample IP-PBX is in the form of an enterprise application archive (EAR) file and is for test purposes only.

The ClickToCall widget is used by the customer who wants to talk to a customer service representative. The customer will enter their telephone number into the ClickToCall widget and select call me. The CallNotification widget is used by the customer service representative. The customer service representative activates the call notification widget so that when the call comes in from the customer, the customer service representative is notified of the call. The ClickToCall and CallNotification widgets are built using the functionality provided in the Dojo toolkit.

See the information center topics for Feature Pack for Communications Enabled Applications.