BackgroundAkibot works with 2 modules: the front end (the microblog) and the robot (the "brain"). Both modules are completely independent and separate, and they communicate via HTTP POST and XML. When you write a message and post it in the microblog module, it does an HTTP POST call to the robot with the message. The robot gets the message and sends back an XML acknowledging the receipt. In the background the robot queues the message for processing. Processing means the message goes through the robot's Contextual Analyzer. The Contextual Analyzer determines the entity (inventory item, vendor, client. contact, marketing campaign, etc. etc.) and the situation (how that entity is being affected in the message/conversation), and, if applicable, makes an HTTP call to inquiry information from the corresponding software (e.g. ERP -SAP; Navision; etc-, Groupware -Exchange, Salesforce, etc. etc). Once the robot has all this information, it decides if an action is required (usually the action is a response back to the microblog module - but can also be updates, alerts, pushing data to other applications, etc) and proceeds to do so by pushing a message back to the microblog module via HTTP POST (the actions are defined by directives, Akibot comes equipped with some standard directives but you can teach him more that are more specific to your industry). SAP Bot Gliffy Diagram |
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size | S |
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name | ubimic - SAP Bot |
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page | ESME:Collaboration with ubimic |
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pageid | 5964323 |
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align | left |
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space | ESME |
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General Use CaseBasically this is how it is working now. The only change would be that ESME would be posting messages to Akibot (robot module, just like the microblog module is doing now) and Akibot would reply back to ESME if needed, and do all the interfacing with enterprise software (ERP, Groupware applications). Technical details- The ESME Bot could be developed in any language but we have examples code for accessing the REST API for clients written in Java and ABAP.
- The access to the SAP system could be performed via various means (web-services, RFC call, etc.) depending on what sort of system (version, etc.) you guys have on the university.
- There are two ways to get data from ESME via a bot.
- You can access the ESME core directly via API - polling for messages
- You can set an actionthat responds to certain tags and then calls your ESME bot via an HTTP call. We've done something like this for forwarding messages to twitter.
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