Communications Enabled Applications (CEA) is a programming
model that provides the ability to add dynamic web communications
to any application or business process.
You can take advantage of integrated telephony and collaborative
web services to extend 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.
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).
Deprecated feature: CEA Dojo widgets encapsulate various
user interfaces that are based on the CEA Rest API. These widgets
are deprecated. You can also obtain the source for these widgets from developerWorks®.
depfeat
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.
The CEA samples package includes three different sample applications
that you can use to explore the telephony access and multi-modal web
interaction services. To learn more, see the information on accessing
the samples and setting up the communications enabled application
samples.