Communications Process Flow

Each communication results in the comm being sent to one target. Multiple targets, such as sending an email to all subscriptions on an account In the Cloud Monetisation Platform, a billing entity that can be used to manage payments on one or more subscriptions or payments for services. An account can hold details such as payments or invoices., is not currently supported.

The communications process is as follows:

A communication request is triggered

The Communications process starts when a communication request is triggered. A trigger can be:

Internal - for example a CMP Converged Monetisation Platform. The MDS Global product that supports customer care and billing for digital service providers. workflow event, raised either manually or automatically.
External - a request from an external system. A communication request can be created automatically on receipt of a notification from an external system.

When a trigger is invoked, CMP creates an entry in the core table in Communications, the Comms Request Header table.

When a Workflow Event is created, irrespective on whether the WhenToCreate is set to OnCreate or OnResolve, an entry in created in the Comms Request Header.

Communication details are gathered

When an entry is created in the Comms Request Header table, the Comms Monitor Job is triggered to process the Comms Request Header and produce a Comms Request Detail. This job:

Works out the appropriate delivery method and target, for example a mobile number, email address etc.
- The Delivery Method chosen depends on:
  The delivery methods that are associated with the communication. So if only one delivery method is configured then that is the chosen delivery method.
- The Communications Preference selected by the customer In the context of the Cloud Monetisation Platform, an individual or organisation who has signed an agreement to take goods and services from a service provider. A customer receives a bill associated with one or more subscriptions, and can be a single end user or a large company with many subscriptions assigned to one agreement.. This is relevant if there are multiple delivery methods associated with a communication. For example, if SMS Short Message Service. A text messaging service component of most mobile telephone systems. SMS uses standardized communication protocols to enable mobile phone devices to exchange short text messages. and Email are configured as delivery methods, and the customer preference is SMS, then they will receive an SMS.
Derives the values of the default fields that are associated with the communication.

Each default field is associated with a bean, which is the software object that retrieves the customer information for the default field from CMP. One or more parameters are configured for the bean, which tell the bean exactly what information to retrieve.
In the case of push notifications, online notifications and SMS delivery methods, the job also merges the data of the derived fields with the message template to produce the actual message. For letters and email, this merging is carried out by separate jobs.

SMS and push and online notifications are sent

After the Comms Monitor Job has completed, dedicated daemons pick up the requests to distribute them to the destination:

Comms SMS Daemon
Comms Push To Handset Daemon
Comms Push To External Daemon

Letters and emails are created and sent

Email and letter communications require additional processing to merge data from default fields gathered from CMP with document templates to generate the required document type. The Comms Monitor job gathers the data; the Comms Email Monitor and the Comms Letter Monitor jobs merge the data.

The Comms Email Monitor and Comms Letter Monitor jobs are triggered automatically when the Comms Monitor job has finished gathering data for Comms Requests relating to emails or letters.

These jobs uses external frameworks - for example, Velocity and Prince XML Exstensible Markup Language. A markup language used to describe data that allows users to define their information formats, especially in order to display documents on the Internet. - to generate documents. Generated documents are subsequently detected by the following downstream daemons for transmission to the customer:

Comms Email Daemon
Comms Letter Daemon

Letters and emails are stored

This is a distinct step carried out by the Comms Storage Daemon. This allows the documents to be placed into storage on any machine, for example, in systems such as Amazon S3 or on a machine via SFTP Secure File Transfer Protocol. A network protocol used for secure file transfer between remote systems over a secure shell.. Storing the documents in a long-term storage directory allows them to be viewed in AgentView The graphical user interface of the CMP that is typically used by Customer Service Agents to access CMP customer and billing data. In versions prior to CMP 8.0, this was called the CMP GUI..

External systems update communications status

An API Application Programming Interface. A set of functions and procedures that allow the creation of applications that access the features or data of another software system, such as an application or operating system. allows external systems to update the status in CMP of communications that were sent externally for processing and/or distribution.