Communications Enabled Applications (CEA) is a functionality
that provides the ability to add dynamic Web communications to any
application or business process.
Avoid trouble: For a list of restrictions that are changed
based on various service levels of the product, see the topic What
is new in the Feature Pack for CEA.
gotcha
The Feature Pack for CEA is a suite of integrated telephony and
collaborative Web services that extends the interactivity of Enterprise
and Web commerce applications. With the CEA capability, Enterprise
solution architects and developers can use a single core application
to enable multiple modes of communication. Enterprise developers do
not need to have extensive knowledge of telephony or Session Initiation
Protocol (SIP) to implement CEA. The CEA capability delivers call
control, notifications, and interactivity and provides the platform
for more complex communications.
The CEA functionality includes compliancy with SIP Servlet Specification
1.1 (Java™ Specification Request
289) in order to utilize the rich media capabilities of this specification.
See the JSR 289 appendix for information about new features in JSR
289.
Using this simplified programming model for adding Web-based communications,
Enterprise developers can do the following:
- Enable any application to quickly add communications support;
for example, click-to-call integration
- Enable shared sessions between end users and the company
- Push relevant session data for application use; for example, customer
phone numbers
- Deliver automated notifications and instant messaging support
- Provide enterprise-grade security, scalability, and high availability
- Integrate with customer private branch exchange (PBX) systems
CEA has two main services, 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. CEA provides telephony access through a
REST interface, through a Web services client, and by using click-to-call
widgets.
- Multimodal Web interaction allows you to provide session linking
(shared sessions) between users browsing the same website from different
locations. With session linking, users can interact dynamically in
collaborative ways, such as cobrowsing or coshopping Web sessions.
Commerce Web sites can use this service to provide product or customer
support, while protecting information on the internal site. Commerce
sites can use the collaborative shopping experience to attract more
customers to their sites. With a combination of click-to-call functionality
and multimodal interaction, you can support two-way synchronized text
forms between the user and a customer service representative (CSR).
CEA is based on SIP-enabled services that use Representation State
Transfer (REST) servlets and Web services in a converged HTTP and
SIP application. CEA includes a library of Dojo-style widgets for
use in Web applications. Dojo widgets are prepackaged components of JavaScript™ and HTML code that
add interactive features that work across platforms and browsers.
CEA widgets are extensible, allowing developers to customize them
to handle more advanced tasks.