Customer

BT Conferencing, Inc. is a subsidiary of British Telecommunications, one of the world's leading communications companies. BT Conferencing provides Audio, Video and Web Conferencing Services. Audio conferencing services will be available in three main offerings: reservationless service, operator-assisted service and premium service. Web-conferencing services will include web collaboration and web presentation, while video conferencing services will provide custom-tailored video conferencing. BT Conferencing began business using conference reservation tools originally developed by British Telecom. Those tools did not support the US business model, and did not provide the required functionality to would allow a smooth, high-quality experience for customers when speaking with the Customer Support Representatives. A new system was needed to meet the following requirements: implement as a web-based application, to support internal and eventual external bookings; support Outlook-like capabilities when booking a call, including recurring conferences; reduce or eliminate the likelihood of redundant information being entered; provide automated provisioning of the conferences onto the bridge hardware.

Solution

Team345 designed and implemented a 3-tier system using JSPs running on Tomcat as the presentation layer, EJBs running inside Oracle's OC4J application server as the business tier, and Oracle 9i as the data tier. Entity EJBs were used to provide access to the data objects, while Session EJBs using bean and container-managed transactions were used to provide the control portion of the business tier. An Application Programming Interface was implemented to allow higher-level access to the object model, and simplify access and hide the use of EJBs from client applications.
For the bridge provisioning functionality, a set of Web Services were developed that provides high-level operations for manipulating the booking information. The implementation of the Web Services utilizes the native C-based API and JDBC to communicate with the bridge hardware and change the information stored on the bridge hardware and database.

Results

Version 1 of the system was deployed to Production in January 2003 on dual-CPU Compaq machines running RedHat™ Advanced Server. Team345 continues to provide services to BT Conferencing.

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