Bookshelf v7.5: Virtual Collaboration and the Project Center

Siebel Employee Relationship Management Administration Guide > Setting Up Siebel Projects >

Virtual Collaboration and the Project Center

Integrating synchronous, real-time collaboration applications into the Project Center page allows project users to collaborate with each another in real time over the Internet or your organization's intranet. Integrated applications can include third-party applications or another Siebel application such as Distance Learning.

The Project Center page incorporates a collaboration section which includes a set of predefined virtual collaboration views. When these views are set up, the user is automatically logged into the virtual collaboration application.

During virtual collaboration setup, portal agents retrieve data by sending HTTP requests to external applications. The HTML results appear in the Siebel application or in a Siebel Web page.

Portal agents are administered using the Integration Administration screen and associated views. These views allow you to define the external host, the ways that links should be handled, and to specify the HTTP request that is sent to the external host.

For more information on setting up portal agents, see Siebel Portal Framework Guide.

Process Guidelines for Setting Up Virtual Collaboration

Use the following process guideline to set up virtual collaboration in Siebel ERM:

Define content fixup. Links that appear in third-party Web applications may be inappropriately configured for display in another application, such as your Siebel application. For example, the links in an instant-messaging application may be defined as relative links. If you include these links in the Project Center page the links do not work. The Fixup Administration view allows you to define how links embedded within external HTML content should be rendered in the Siebel user interface. Your Siebel application is preconfigured with several fixup types, however, you can define a new one for your needs.

Define the external host. You define the external data hosts in the Host Administration view. Defining the external host allows you to also create symbolic URLs to reference the external host, such as SSO Server, rather than typing in the specific host information. This is useful because you can have multiple symbolic URLs that reference the same external data host. If the external host information changes, you only need to change the server location in the Host Administration view rather than edit each symbolic URL. This view allows you to:

maintain external host names in a single place

specify NCSA Basic authentication credentials

define how links should be handled (fixed-up) after external HTML content is rendered

Define Web applications. Web applications allow multiple Symbolic URLs to send requests to the same Web application and share the same session. This is useful if you have two different applet controls that use Symbolic URLs to submit requests to the same Web application. You can associate these Symbolic URLs to a single Web application and define whether or not sharing occurs during the same session.

Define Symbolic URLs. You use the Symbolic URL Administration view to specify how the HTTP request to the external application is constructed and to define any arguments and values to be sent as part of the request.

Define Symbolic URL Arguments. Symbolic URL Arguments allow you to configure portal agents in several ways. You use symbolic URL arguments to define data that is sent to an external host and to submit commands to SWE that affect the behavior of portal agents.