Chapter Intranet Agents

Chapter Background Intranet: an internal corporate network based on Internet technology. Typically, an intranet can be accessed by –the employees of an organization, as well as –customers and suppliers, with a password.

Chapter Background Business applications of intranets: –Effective internal communications medium –Virtual communities –Sales force automation –Marketing support automation –Customer service –Internal help desk –Human resource support

Chapter Background An intranet agent is a software agent that resides on a corporate HTTP server. Such an agent help manage business processes on behalf of the employees, customer and supplier of a corporation.

Chapter Background Every category of Internet agent has applications on corporate intranet. Additional application of intranet agents: –Collaboration agents –Process automation agents –Database agents –Mobile agents

Chapter Intranet Search Agents

Chapter Intranet Search Agents

Chapter Intranet Search Agents

Chapter Information Filtering Agents

Chapter Collaboration Agents Collaboration software is an application that runs over a network and enables team to work together sharing information. For example, –Lotus Notes, MS Exchange, Novell GroupWise, and Netscape Collabora. Other focus on specific niches –For project management GroupWorks from FTP Software Workgroup Information Manager from Commerce –For discussion management OpenMind by Attachmate Team Talk from TraxSoftworks

Chapter Collaboration Agents A messaging system is a key component of collaboration software. Collaboration software assists the members of a workgroup in: –Group scheduling –Discussion groups –Resource tracking –Document management –Collaborative filtering

Chapter Collaboration Agents A collaboration agent is a software component that brings agent functionality into collaborative software. Some simple tasks for collaboration software products include the following: –Save an re-execute sharable queries that search groupware databases. –Perform a script whenever a user-specified event is added to the database. –Perform a script according to a time-based schedule.

Chapter Lotus Notes (Release 4) Agents Notes agents are LotusScript programs which a user can attach to any database or even individual Notes objects within a database with proper authorization access. These agents can then be triggered by one of a number of events and perform user-defined actions. Construction of Notes agents: –Selecting the database of interest in the Notes client –Selecting Create/Agent from the Notes client toolbar –Using the visual editor to define the agent

Chapter Lotus Notes (Release 4) Agents The agent is defined in four fields –The name of the agent –A definition of when the agent should run Manually from the agent list If new mail has arrived. Of documents have been created, modified, or pasted. On a schedule of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly. –What documents should the agent act on? All document in the database to which the agent is attached. All new and modified documents since the agent was run. All unread documents in the selected view of the database. Selected documents. –What should the agent do? LotusScript program

Chapter Lotus Notes (Release 4) Agents How do Notes agents help the enterprise? –For example, you can attach an agent to the corporate financial database that will notify you, for example, whenever a particular field is updated. –Set up watchdog agent. –Set up information agent.

Chapter Process Automation Agents Process automation agents automate workflow in business applications. Typically, business processes involve the interaction of an employee, customer, vendor with multiple units of an organization. In a conventional workflow system, automation involves the automatic execution of a sequence of tasks defining a business process. –For example, in a transaction processing system, a workflow engine executes a workflow script.

Chapter Process Automation Agents The differences between traditional WF automation and process agents: –TWF: the central WF engine monitors all system event. –PA: offering a distributed infrastructure where each agent represents a separate business task with local monitoring capabilities, thus more scalable solution. –TWF: structured environment where the business process is defined for every possible condition. –PA: having the capability of managing resources during task execution, thus more flexible environment –TWF: exceptional handling by defining alternate path to be followed in case of error. –PA: having the ability to dynamically negotiate tasks between multiple agents in order to resolve exceptions.

Chapter Process Automation Agents Process automation agents employ a language (e.g., KIF, Knowledge Interchange Format) to describe processes, and enable machine reasoning about the operation on these processes. Creation Planning Execution Specification Negotiation Scheduling Monitoring Execution Notification specifying the agent assigned to the task, a set of trigger events for interaction of task execution, task description, and a set of stop conditions

Chapter Database Agents OLAP Server Oracleinformix SQLP Server VLDB Drivers DSS Agent Desktop

Chapter Mobile Agents Mobile agents are software agents that can transport themselves from a client computer to various servers for remote execution. Remote procedure calls (RPCs) –communicating data to procedure to be executed on a remote server Mobile agent –transporting both the data and program acting on the data within its specification.

Chapter Mobile Agents Client Agent Server Agent Server 1 Client Agent Server Agent Server 1 Client Agent Server Agent Server 1 Network Client Agent Desktop

Chapter Mobile Agents Client Agent Platform Client Agent Client Agent Platform Client Agent Network The security issues involve authenticating the sender of the MA, determining the user’s authority to execute agents at the server, and verifying the agent’s ability to pay for services rendered at the server.

Chapter Mobile Agents Choices of an agent communication language –Tcl and Safe-Tcl: a machine independent scripting language that uses to transport agent procedures as content of mail messages (Osterhout, 1994). –Telescript by General Magic: an agent operating environment designed for MAs. Object-oriented. –KIF (Knowledge Interchange Format) is an extended first- order predicate calculus for agent-server and agent-agent communication. A product of ARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort –Java