The dot before the Net : CCF

My new articles published

Sanket Bakshi — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 22:08:00 GMT

Since my last post regarding my articles, there have been a couple of things that I was working with. Here are some things that have been published since then.

1. Biztalk Server - Business Value
http://www.pcquest.com/content/enterprise/2006/106060807.asp

2. Fighting Call Center Blues with CCF
http://www.pcquest.com/content/enterprise/2006/106071603.asp

3. Biztalk 2004 Business Rules (This is an old one but published online recently)
~~http://www.pcquest.com/content/search/showarticle.asp?artid=82720~~
http://pcquest.ciol.com/content/enterprise/2006/106040804.asp (Changed Link)

As always, do let me know your feedback on these. That will just help me make them better. :)

--Sanket

Introducing CCF

Sanket Bakshi — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 03:20:43 GMT

Recently, I had published an article regarding CCF with PC Quest (an IT magazine in India).

The primary objective of this being introducing the technology to the readers and figuring out how it fits into the call centers business context.

This was published in the July 06 issue of PC Quest and is now available online at -

http://www.pcquest.com/content/enterprise/2006/106071603.asp

Take a look and I am very much interested to know your feedback on it.

--Sanket Bakshi

CCF Webcast (for Developers) by Herb Fickes

Sanket Bakshi — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 20:00:03 GMT

While trying to find a couple of other things about CCF, I got to this MSDN webcast today. Its a nice Level 300 web cast presented by Herb Fickes - a Senior CCF Consultant.

The webcast explains the basic CCF concepts like - Hosted Applications, the AIF, actions and lot other stuff. Definitely a must see for all those who want to know more about CCF Development.

EHLLAPI Progamming Guide & other resources

Sanket Bakshi — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 02:07:22 GMT

A couple of days ago, I had blogged about Automating 3270 emulators with EHLLAPI. While looking for some more information on it, I came across the EHLLAPI Programming Reference published by Alebra Technologies.

Its almost a 90 pager PDF guide that explains well in detail about all the functions that can be performed with the EHLLAPI along with how you can go about implementing them. Even some gotchas that you need to look for.

There is also a very nice sample provided by Luca Bertoncini at Code Project titled - "Using EHLLAPI in C#".

Overall, these are very nice and helpful resources that can help you get started quickly for automating the 3270 emulators.

--Sanket

Automating 3270 emulators with EHLLAPI

Sanket Bakshi — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 21:36:40 GMT

The green screen days aren't completely gone yet! If you are working in integration projects, there will be a couple of times when you bump into those ugly green screens that want to hide everything that they have into a closed box called the mainframe. Most of the times, these mainframe apps just wont go because they are very crucial to the business. But the entire org moves over to the Microsoft platform. So what do you do? The simplest way is of course - use emulators :) There are a lot of emulators in the market that you can use like the Zephyr Passport or the Attachmate Extra or the BlueZone emulator by Seagull Software.

Much of these 3270 apps were designed the archaic way and have no real connection to the word "UI". But still they stand there and we got to figure out some ways to ease the pains of using them. That's where we think of automating them from our own applications.

Somewhere in the medieval age, between ours and the archaic green screen age, when the green screens were being accessed from the PCs using the DOS based TSRs, somebody came up with a API interface that can be used to access and control these 3270 sessions. Personally, I don't think anybody has touched these APIs to make them better after that. These are being called the EHLLAPI (right from the medieval age) - the Extended High Level Language API.

Now when you are dealing with integrating the functionality at the presentation layer - which is what you would be doing most of the times with CCF, the EHLLAPIs come real handy. Most of the emulators out there in the market support EHLLAPI as a standard way of interacting. In effect, you can get one EHLLAPI program that can work with all the emulators that support EHLLAPI. The EHLLAPI will allow you to interact with the emulator screen exactly as if you have a user interacting with it. If it can be best understood with a scenario, here goes a simple one. You have a mainframe app that requires you to provide your username and password in order to use it. Simple isn't it? In a default case, the user would always need to go to the emulator screen and type in his credentials and hit the "Return" key. That's definitely a very repetitive task and you would love it if the system just knows who you are and logs you in. Right? Combining the stuff, we can use the SSO to map the users windows credentials to his mainframe login and then use the EHLLAPI with the emulator to automate the login procedure after fetching the credentials from the SSO.

The EHLLAPI provides just one method to interact with it. That's the hllapi(). The function takes certain parameters that determine what actions are to be performed. The actions to be performed are determined by an integer number. For example its 40 to set the cursor position and 3 to send a keyboard key to the emulator. (I told you guys, I don't think this has been updated ever since the medieval age :) ). Along with every function goes the data that the API can use for performing the action. Like for example, to set a cursor position, you need to know what the position is. Or to set the text, you need to know what text to set. This information goes in the data field.

To access the EHLLAPI, the emulator would usually come with a DLL that would encapsulate the EHLLAPI code. In my case, I worked with the BlueZone Emulator by Seagull Software and they ship a DLL named - PCSHLL.dll. This can be referenced using a DllImport statement and that's it. Your C# code will be able to interact with the emulator. Here is an example of how it will go -

[DllImport("PCSHLL.dll")]
public static extern UInt32 hllapi(out UInt32 Func, StringBuilder Data, out UInt32 Length, out UInt32 RetC);

Hope this alleviates a bit of pain for all you guys who are looking at a way of getting these green screens to do some productive work on Windows.

Changing Tracks - Focus on Customer Care Framework

Sanket Bakshi — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 02:12:06 GMT

Yeah I know, its been more than a week or two that I am inactive. But then there is a reason for it.
Off late I've been involved in implementing Customer Care solutions with Microsoft Customer Care Framework. And I definitely think its a cool arena to explore.
Of course, the BizTalk server still remains a personal favourite, but then you can expect to find a lot of customer care and CCF related posts in the coming days.

(What? you dont know what is CCF? just check out @ http://www.Microsoft.com/ccf)

A CCF solution is definitely not a piece of cake as it might seem from the marketing material. There is a lot of stuff that goes into a real good Customer Care solution.

You need to think about accessibility, flexibility, the user expirience and a lot of other stuff. But definitely CCF eases out a huge amount of blues as we wade through these waters.

One of the best part of the framework is amazing ease and flexibility with which you can do presentation integration. For call centers, the LOB & OSS/BSS apps form a major chunk of the systems that they HAVE TO rely on. In an ideal world, all these systems would be talking to each other in a common language and things would go in a perfect harmony. But then we all know that this isnt the ideal world :).

Integrating these applications with a common middle tier and then having a single front end to deal with every possible customer query is the best integration that can be achieved. But with the myriad systems out there, it is a way too time consuming job asking for a lot of investments.

CCF offers a quick integration solution that can be your first step to getting into the SOA world. And with that amount of flexibility and agility, the call center simply starts saving big bucks just by reducing the average time it takes for a customer care agent to fulfill the customer queries.

So, all that being said, CCF seems a great avenue to me and thats what I am doing at the moment.

More to come as I go ahead with it.