Windows Live Agents SDK Self-Hosting

imiluk — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 21:50:00 GMT

Windows Live Agents SDK offers the ability to self host your agent for development and testing purposes. Limited number of license sessions is granted per service (common-service, MSN, etc) per month. License session limits are imposed per license certificate; they are shared among all your agents if you have multiple ones running in SDK management console. Currently, the standard license certificate offers 500 common-service sessions, and 500,000 MSN sessions per month. Each service also gets 50,000 burst sessions, we will explain the burst sessions a little later.

Self Host Your Agent(s):

To start self-hosting, you need to have Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 and Windows Live Agents SDK installed and a Windows Live account. Please refer to the Windows Live Agents SDK help file for detailed steps on how to obtain a license certificate. (Windows Live Agents SDK -> Getting Started with Windows Live Agents SDK -> How to: Install the License Key)

To add and start your agents through the SDK management console, please refer to the Windows Live Agents SDK help file. (Windows Live Agents SDK -> Windows Live Agents SDK Developer’s Guide -> Launching and Testing Your Agents)

Self-Host Limitations

No redundancy or failover capabilities.

No load balancing.

Limited number of license sessions per month.

License Sessions Details:

The license sessions renew daily at 1/30^th of the monthly limit for each service. Please note, burst sessions are not renewable, it is for the lifetime of the license.

For example: common-service sessions renew at 17 sessions per day, and MSN sessions renew at 16667 sessions per day.

How are license sessions counted? One license session is one continuous hour of interactivity with the agent through a service (ex. HTTP, MSN) for one user starting from the first time the user engages the agent. The license session continues whether the user interacts with the agent or not after the initial request.

For example, user U1 chats with agent A1 at 10:00 pm for 5 minutes, then chats with agent A1 again at 11:01 pm for another 5 minutes, two sessions will be counted; user U2 chats with Agent A2 at 10:00 pm for 30 minutes, then chats with the agent again at 10:45 for 5 minutes, only one session will be counted.

When all license sessions for one service are used, burst sessions for that service will be used, and the agent will be running in demo-mode for that service. While in demo-mode, the agent will only interact with new users for one license session through that service. The agent will stop interacting with users through the service when both regular and burst sessions for that service run out.

Please note that one license session is used per hour when you are connected to the SDK management console (http://localhost:8000), to avoid this, simply close your connection (browser) to the SDK management console when not needed.

Windows Live Agents Team Blog : Self Hosting

Windows Live Agents SDK Self-Hosting