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About Automatically Updating Message Broadcasting Text

As an administrator, you can customize message broadcasting to automatically update message text that changes frequently. For example, a call center's queue statistics frequently change. Every few minutes, an administrator has to update the statistics to make sure agents have the most accurate information. This manual approach is very time consuming and inefficient when dealing with frequently changing data.

You can use Siebel EAI to automatically update message broadcasting text. Your CTI middleware or ACD switch can provide the data for the Siebel application to distribute.

The Broadcast Message business component manages the messages. Table 14 lists and describes the fields of this business component. These field names are necessary for developing the integration object.

A sample Visual Basic (VB) script follows, which demonstrates how to create and update a broadcast message with information, using the call center queue as an example. The sample Visual Basic script is generic; your CTI middleware's API determines the structure of syntax like the Msg command.

Sample Message Broadcasting Script

The script can be created through a button, an Excel macro, or another VB application. Because it is a script and not an application, it does not need the VB Set command. All the commands are standard to VB coding.

This script is designed to update a message without an expiration date, not to create a new message every time. For more information about how to get or create a Siebel Application Object, see Configuring Siebel Business Applications.

NOTE:  The code in this example updates single value fields. For information about how to update multi-value fields, see Configuring Siebel Business Applications.

'Get "Broadcast Message" BusComp

Set BusObj = SiebelApplication.GetBusObject("Broadcast Message", errCode)

Set BusComp = BusObj.GetBusComp("Broadcast Message", errCode)

'Find "Calls Waiting" message

BusComp.SetSearchSpec "Abstract", "Calls In Queue", errCode

BusComp.ExecuteQuery 0, errCode

If BusComp.FirstRecord(errCode) <> True Then

'We need to create a new message

BusComp.NewRecord 0, errCode

BusComp.SetFieldValue "Abstract", "Calls In Queue", errCode

End If

'Prepare message using middleware API info.

Set Msg = "[N]Calls Waiting: [U]10"

'Update the record

BusComp.SetFieldValue "Body", Msg, errCode

BusComp.SetFieldValue "All", "Y", errCode

'Write the record

BusComp.WriteRecord errCode

In addition to writing a script, you can use Siebel Business Process Designer to create or update a broadcast message. For more information, see Siebel Business Process Framework: Workflow Guide.