The Preferences Manager

This document describes the preferences manager GUI to create user preference profiles to be used in conjunction with the preference registry. Please see the preference registry documentation here for more information about the preference registry.

Preference profiles are for managing incoming communication. They are based on a set of rules. The GUI lets the user specify the rules, verify them to a certain extent, and upload them to the preference registry.

Configuration

Under configuration, you can specify three sets of parameters. "Incoming interfaces" is supposed to be the "type" of incoming call (caller calling from cell-phone, or trying to reach via pager, etc). Ignore this for now.

"Outgoing interfaces" is supposed to be list of end-points on which the user can receive incoming communication. Specify here all the service-specific IAPs and the corresponding service-specific IDs. The iap_url has to be given as "rmi://hostname/className" where hostname is the machine on which the particular IAP is running and className is the name of the Java class file of the IAP (to do an iSpace lookup). And the callee_id is specified in LDAP DN format as a service-specific-id or unique-id depending on the IAP. Specification of either of these could have a better interface.

"Timespans" are where you can define logical names for time-spans in the day. The purpose of this is to have call redirection based on time of day.

Groups of people

Under "Who's who" in the GUI, you can define individuals and group them for purposes of preference specification. For instance, if you want to specify a rule saying that a particular set of business-partners can reach you on your cell-phone, you should first give the identities of these people and group them under a name of your choice.

The "name" and "unique-id" fields in the middle are used to define an individual. The unique-id is the Iceberg unique-id and has to be given in email format (refer the naming service documentation here). Too bad there's no way to modify identities of users.

Pecking order

This refers to the specification of which group of people are allowed to interrupt which other group of people on incoming calls. The GUI for this is pretty simple.

Find me service

This is relevant when the user has more than one telephone end-point and wishes to specify the order in which a caller should try those telephone end-points. For instance, one might want to be called on the office phone first, if that fails, on the cell-phone, then finally on voice-mail.

Call simulator

This is a nice tool to verify if the preference would actually do what you intended them to. You need to specify at least one incoming interface for this to work -- this needs to be fixed.

Specifying rules

In each rule, you identify the group of people, the time-span, and redirect the call to some end-point.

Uploading to the server

This uses the ScriptLoaderIF of the preference registry to upload the preferences for the user.

Running the preferences manager

The preferences manager is run with the command:

java iceberg.prefreg.prefmgr.pm pref-server email-id

The first argument is the location of the preference registry server. The second argument is the user's Iceberg unique-id in email address format (no authentication done while uploading preferences).


Rahul Biswas, rahul@biswas.net; Bhaskaran Raman, bhaskar@cs.berkeley.edu
Last modified: Mon May 29 23:57:45 PDT 2000