Patent Application
20120254293
This invention relates generally to cloud-based computing, and in particular to an application server for provisioning a controlled communications system, such as a virtual PBX in a cloud-based environment.
In cloud-based computing customers do not own the physical infrastructure, but instead avoid capital expenditure by “renting” usage from a third-party service provider. Cloud-based services are services that reside in the cloud that a user can subscribe to. There are various applications that are provided, one of them being Communications.
Cloud-based communications (also known as Communications as a Service (CaaS)), is a hosted solution provided and managed as a service. This is a similar concept to Centrex, which is a centralized PBX (Private Branch Exchange), where the hosting company provides the hardware and connects to the customer through dedicated lines. In a cloud-based solution, the enterprise customer accesses the communication service through the Internet or an IP managed network service. The enterprise does not buy server hardware or software, but does buy phones that connect through the Internet to the service, and must maintain their own Internet access and hardware.
The communications services are delivered as a common set of features and functions. The enterprise subscribes to the features and functions desired. The financial arrangements for access can be by the seat, phone, feature, usage, or unlimited usage with flat fee. A major benefit of such systems is a reduced, controlled and predictable cost. Because the cloud site is shared with many other subscribers, the overall hardware, software and operations costs can be prorated over the subscribing organizations. The enterprise benefits from the service providers economy of scale, which translates into lower cost service. Other advantages include:
Many problems arise for the service providers as a result of telephony moving from the company premises to the cloud. Service Providers are faced with having to cost-effectively manage large numbers of customers and end users. Enterprises need to have similar control over the system as they did when it was on premise. The Service Provider must provide central management with dispersed control. The end user needs to be able to access the system even though it is off-site. All customer support has to be performed through a call center, incurring significant costs as customers grow and change; each customer may require hundreds of data modifications per year.
Maintaining customer records for billing purposes is a considerable problem, with isolated systems that do not communicate with each other or upload information to a common application. This is a handicap to customer self service as there is no way to determine when phone users are created or deleted, determine when their subscription is modified, or provide that information to a billing system.
Another problem service provider's face is, in the case of a large customer, the aggregation of many instances of a particular PBX solution into one, and making the customer unaware that there is more than one. The opposite situation is having many small customers using one instance of a PBX.
The provisioning of a PBX is a very time consuming practice, with many different forms having to be filled out in the correct order. Multiply this by many customers, either using multiple instances of a PBX, or many customers utilizing the same PBX, the organization of the data and the keeping track of which resources belong to which customer can become problematic quickly. As well, Service Providers may want to let Resellers do all or part of the management for a certain set of companies, so there can be another layer of complexity for managing these Resellers as well.
Packaging of features into comprehensive, and easily deployable and maintainable bundles to the customer is also a problem.
Service Providers have the ability to monitor at will, lawfully or unlawfully, the communication and data stored between the user and the host company. This creates a problem surrounding the external management of security-based services.
Since the service is based in the cloud, there will be some delay when features or functions are accessed.
Another problem is how well the service operates and supports user productivity. The features offered should require little training and be intuitive in their operation. The more difficult to learn and use the service, the less productive the user.
There are many diverse applications that a customer might want to subscribe to, therefore linking these various applications so that provisioning is done from one place is another problem.
Embodiments of the invention package diverse forms that would normally require expert intervention at the service provider level and present them to the client in a common user-friendly interface that allows the user to configure directly the communications system without an intimate knowledge of the programming language for the system and without having to take into account the impact of desired changes on the overall system configuration.
According to a first aspect of the invention there is provided an application server for provisioning one or more controlled communication systems hosted on a server in a network environment through a portal application, wherein said controlled communication system is provisioned in response to data input in a particular language, comprising: a viewer-and-controller module for presenting either a graphical user interface (GUI) or an Application Programming Interface (API) to a client containing fields for accepting client input pertaining to the controlled communication system provisioning requirements; an API interface module for communicating with the controlled communication system including a wrapper module for translating between normalized data for use by the viewer-and-controller module and data in the particular controlled communication system language for any controlled communication system, and a provisioning module for communicating with said wrapper module; and wherein said viewer- and controller-module further comprises a controller module for generating said GUI or said API, and a transaction module responsive to client input to query said API interface module to obtain data required to implement user provisioning requests in the viewer-and-controller modules to create a new or modified user profile, or a new or modified room profile; and said transaction module further including a command module for sending commands as normalized data to the provisioning module to implement said new or modified client profile in said one or more communication systems via said wrapper module.
The invention will be particularly described in the context of a virtual PBX, but the invention is also applicable to other forms of controlled communication system, such as a Voicemail server, an Audio Conferencing System, a Video Conferencing System, a Mobile Unified Communication System, and a PBX, referred to in the present application generally as a controlled communication system.
The profile is related to a single user, but it may also relate to a common room that is provisioned as a user such as would be found in a conference room environment. This is referred to herein as a “room profile”.
According to a second aspect of the invention there is provided a computer-implemented method of provisioning one or more controlled communications systems hosted on an application server in a network environment through a portal application, wherein said controlled communications systems are provisioned in response to data input in a particular language, comprising: presenting a graphical user interface (GUI) to a client or an Application Programming Interface (API) containing fields for accepting user input pertaining to PBX provisioning requirements; establishing communication with the controlled communications systems through a wrapper module that translates between normalized data for use by the viewer-and-controller module and data in the particular PBX language for any communications system; and responding to user input to query said API interface module to obtain data required to implement user provisioning requests to create a new or modified user profile, or a new or modified room profile; and sending commands as normalized data to the wrapper module to implement said new or modified user profile in said one or more controlled communications systems.
The invention may be implemented as a computer program running on a suitable processor or processors, in which case the invention extends to a storage medium containing instructions to implement the invention. The modules may be distinct software or hardware modules, or integrated into common entities providing the necessary functionality. It will also be appreciated that the application server can be provided by a single application server or a network of individual servers, possibly geographically dispersed.
Embodiments of the invention provide a portal, which is a management and customer self-service application that provides scalable administration capabilities over many PBX instances and customer sites for service provider users and easy configuration and control of the phone system for the enterprise customers. For service providers who want to offer hosted voice service with PBX's, the portal delivers cost savings by automating the provisioning process, simplifying management and providing customers with easy to use interfaces for self-service and feature control.
The portal may be hosted centrally in the data center and provide configuration access to the PBX instances through a web interface accessible with standard browsers. It facilitates easy service delivery by enabling customer control through an intuitive interface while maintaining the global control over managing the aggregated PBX instances with the service provider. Flexible feature allocation enables service providers to create bundles that allow the customer to easily manage their service usage as well as presenting the potential for the service provider to up sell customers on advanced features.
The portal delivers important functionality to service providers by enabling them to cost effectively offer hosted voice from a datacenter with PBXs. Embodiments of the invention deliver value in four areas:
The core module of the portal delivers service providers simplified management of large PBX deployments. Through a hierarchy of customizable role based profiles, the service provider can define the features their users are able to access and ensure that they are presented with an intuitive interface for PBX controls.
The portal enables the creation of customized Operations Profiles for access to service provider management features. The profiles ensure users have access to the features required for their role in the organization.
The core module features are designed to provide flexible management so that service providers can create their own service definitions and efficiently deliver hosted voice services to enterprise customers.
Control of customers in multi-site deployment of PBX s is centralized to a single view from which the service provider is able to create customers and resellers and manage existing sites. This provides a view of the critical customer/reseller information required by a service representative or a sales user deploying service to a new site. In new deployments this enables the assignment of PBX instances and allocation of a bundle cap for the site.
Enterprise users may be created as either administrators or end users. The administrators are enabled with access and control of all users in the company, providing the ability to self-service for creation, deletion and editing.
Enterprise control and bundling provides end users with access to the operations they require. This enables efficient use of licenses and provides end users with access to modify their features and profile information through standard web browsers.
User management features provide control and configuration for adding, modifying and removing customer users. This feature will allow enterprises or resellers on behalf of the enterprise to setup new employees with their phone features and their portal account. The user's information can be edited by the customer administrator or through self-service by the end user.
The solution is targeted at service providers to help them solve the problems mentioned above.
Embodiments of the invention thus deliver a highly scalable and dense communication services platform, the control and flexibility needed to distribute cost-effective communication services from a data center with integration into billing and operations systems, and service delivery to small and medium-sized businesses through a direct or indirect sales channel.
Installation costs may be kept low through a simple license model that only requires service providers to purchase licenses for the number of extensions under management, tying increases in license purchases to increases in service provider revenue.
By providing intuitive and easy to use self-service, customer churn is reduced and satisfaction increased.
Embodiments of the invention also allow for a customer to have geographically dispersed users, which can take into account the time zone they are in. This is especially crucial for emergency services, so that the correct location is given when an emergency call is made. It also includes things like making sure the time shown on the phone is right, or alarm features that are set use local time for the user, not the PBX time.
Embodiments of the invention capture information from the individual PBXs and aggregates it into a single point of access for the service provider, reseller, and customer.
Automating what was previously a multi-step and time-consuming process simplifies service delivery and enables service providers to easily deploy more resources as their customer base scales. This includes mass creation and configuration of users for a customer.
All information on new users or modifications to service may be stored and can be easily viewed or connected to a billing system.
Service providers can define unique profiles for customer's users, limiting access to sensitive information, and providing flexibility for what features are grouped together and sold to customers. How this is done also provides for a more secure system. These are known as bundles. Bundles also define the role a particular user has. This allows service provider customers to access and control their own communications services. End users are provided easy access to phone programming, unlocking the rich phone features and information previously trapped in the phone set that could only be accessed through the keypad. As well, instead of having to call the service provider every time a new user is added or service is modified, the customer is able to login securely and make all the necessary modifications. This results in:
Roles created within the application can be contextual, based on when a role logs in, where they log in, what they log in on, who is logging in and why they are logging in.
By providing customers and resellers with an intuitive user interface for modifying service options and user details, significant cost savings are realized by reducing load on customer support centers at the service provider. Because the programming of a new customer is simplified, the need for the service provider to employ highly skilled PBX configuration managers is kept to a minimum.
Embodiments of the invention also allow for service providers to “push” advertisements to all their customers or resellers, and users of the PBX (based on the “role” of the person using the application, or their usage patterns, such as long distance calling, or type of cell phone they bought) that could include new savings, new offerings, new phones, improvement to services, etc.
This is all done with minimal hardware cost to the customer, since the application is capable of running on a very low cost PC. The application can also be set (for security reasons), so that only a particular piece of hardware can be used to log into the system.
The portal application is also scalable and redundant. Each customer can be ‘virtualized’, so that different versions of the application can be sold, upgraded to, etc.
The invention will now be described in more detail, by way of example only, with reference to the accompanying drawings, in which:—
As noted, while the invention is generally application to controlled communication systems operating in cloud-based environments, the invention will be described in detail in association with a virtual PBX, which provides a centrally hosted PBX solution to remote clients.
In the described embodiment, the portal is a Java web application running on a JBoss application server on a hardware or virtual machine in the data center that is accessible from a standard web browser, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Firefox. The portal application communicates to the PBX instances through a proprietary protocol. Referring to
A single PBX 35 can be allocated to many customers 33, 34, or one customer 32 can use many PBX's 31. Servers 25 are connected to the LAN/WAN 19 in a standard way 26 running Portal Apps 27 (not necessarily one app per server). Databases 39 that contain data for the Portal App are connected in a standard way 37 to the LAN/WAN 19. The reason for the multiple Portal Apps and Databases is so that there can be a virtual app and virtual database per customer so that they can be individually upgraded.
Also connected to the LAN/WAN 19 are External Applications 23, running on Servers 21 connected to the LAN/WAN in a standard way 22 that can, through an API 24, access information (for example a billing number, or customer name) from the Portal App 27 stored in a Database 39. The external applications could also be external (Client Relationship Management) CRM applications and external provisioning applications
Within the Service provider, there exists one or more PBX “experts” 40 connected to the PBX's 31, 35, 42 in either a proprietary way (as defined by the PBX) 41, or via the LAN/WAN 19 via a standard way 44, which are people knowledgeable in the provisioning of the PBX(s) 31, 35, 42. Their responsibilities include:
As well, there are other Roles or Operation Profiles 28 within the Service Provider 20 which have different levels of access to the Portal App that can see and/or modify the data for a customer using Web Pages 29 connected in a standard way 30 to the LAN/WAN 19.
Customers 10 of the Service Provider are connected via the WAN 19. They have geographically dispersed phones 14 connected through the WAN 19 using VOIP 15 to the PBX(s) 31, 35, 42 associated with the customer 10, 32, 33, 34. Roles 11 can be defined in the Portal App 27 that are specific for the particular customer to allow them to see/modify various parts of their particular system through Web Pages 12 connected to the LAN/WAN 19 in a standard way 13. They can also house a Portal App 17 running on a Server 16, connected to the WAN/LAN in a standard way 18 in offline mode, which can store any changes that the customer makes (if the WAN 19 is inaccessible for a period of time), which can synch up to the main App/Database 27, 39 when the connection is reestablished.
Referring to
The Viewer and Controller module 100 is responsible for presenting the web pages 29, 12 corresponding to the Role 28, 11 that is accessing the Portal App 27.
The viewer and controller module 100 may also package communications system forms together such that a high level services room/user creation form or API is presented. The high level services may include naming and packaging Classes of Service, and naming and packaging Classes of Restriction.
The communications system forms may be, for example, a number of extension creation forms, a form for grouping all user/room extensions together to create a twinning ring group, a form for configuring voicemail for the user/room, and a form for setting up routing of the extensions to voicemail, a form for setting up routing of a user belonging to a specific company to voicemail, a form for setting up routing of a user belonging to a specific company to voicemail based on a unique pre-pended id to the user's extensions, a form for configuring Class of Restriction, and a form for configuring Class of Service.
The viewer and controller module 100 is also responsible for presenting an API 106 to an External application 107 that allows this application to program the system.
The API/Interface Software 101 is responsible for presenting and controlling the API 24 that is given to external application 23 (for example CRM, Billing, Provisioning, etc.) that allows them to extract information from the Databases 39 specific to a particular Customer (10, 32, 33, 34 from
The Database(s) 39 holds Customer information, Call Control information, and Bundle information. They are redundant, and provide Customer virtualization.
Referring to
Requests 205 that require query or manipulation of data go to the Transaction System 212 which is broken up into two parts, the Query System 213 and the Command System 214.
The Query System 213 is an abstraction on top of Web Services 217 (implemented using SOAP, Simple Object Access Protocol) which returns Java Objects 218 representing Model Data, for example Users. It uses the API 105 to the API Interface Software 101 to get the information to put into the Java Objects 218.
The Command System 214 uses Web Services 217 through API 105 to the API Interface Software 101 to execute the commands. PBX's traditionally do not support roll backs. Since this system bundles a group of commands together to make it easier on the Role 28, 11 to create something, for example a User in the PBX (which needs for example an extension a voicemail box and a DID number), if all the operations do not complete, the operations need to be undone since the role expects the user to have been provisioned with everything. Commands 215 implement an “execute and rollback” method. Commands that must execute together are run in a command context 216 which rolls back all previously executed commands if any one command fails.
Referring to
Web Services 300, are EJB 305 calls exposed as SOAP web services. Web Services 300 are divided into 2 groups, Provisioning Web Services 301 and Billing Web Services 302.
Provisioning Web Services 301 provide access to information on Users, Bundles, Extensions, etc. by interfacing with the PBXs 31, 35, 42 to get PBX Data 104 through a Wrapper (Caching System) 103 which can translate the requests to and from the different PBX ‘languages’ to create “Normalized” Data 105. Billing API's 302 provide access to External Apps 23, via API 24 to retrieve information from the Databases 39.
Using the diagram for
Box 402, the Servlet goes through the Query System 213 and uses the API interface Software 101 to check the Database 39 to make sure the client is allowed to add a new User.
If not a failure is returned to the client (Box 403) as a Response 209 to the Web Page 201.
If it is successful, Box 404, the data for the new User is extracted, and the commands 215 to create a new user, create an extension, create a voicemail box, and assign a DID number are created.
Box 405, the Context 216 is then created to run the commands.
Box 406, the appropriate next command is executed.
Now using the diagram in
Box 408, the Web Service Call is accepted by the EJB 305.
Box 409 checks to see if a PBX Operation is required to fulfill the command.
If not, then it jumps to Box 415.
If so, Box 410, the Wrapper 103 is given the “normalized” data and it converts it into the correct command to send to the PBX(s) 31, 35, 42 via PBX data 104.
If the operation is not successful, Box 412, the EJB 305 returns an error through the Web Service 300.
Box 413, referring back to
Box 414 a Response 209 is sent back to the client via the Web Page 201.
In Box 411, if the PBX operation was successful, then Box 415, it checks to see if a Database Operation is needed. If not it jumps to Box 418.
If yes, Box 416, referring to the diagram in
Box 416, if the operation is not successful, then it goes to Box 412, etc. which is described above.
If it is successful, Box 417, is the same as Box 410, the Wrapper 103 is given the “normalized” data and it converts it into the correct command to send to the PBX via PBX data 104.
Box 418, it checks to see if this is the last command, and if not, it goes to Box 406 and does it again.
If it is the last command then, Box 419, it returns Success to the client via the Web Page.
The described portal application offers many advantages, some of which may include:
