To start off, here's a bit of info on what I'm trying to accomplish, so if there's a better way of doing it, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
I'm creating and Android Kiosk application that leverages Lync UCWA to sit at the entrance of my work and when visitors enter the office, they'll use the Kiosk to notify somebody in the office that there is a guest.
I've had a new Lync user created for this purpose, which will be the account authenticated on the kiosk and will be the user sending outgoing messaging invitations.
What I want to accomplish is to create a group conversation by adding multiple people to a conversation so that everybody gets the message and somebody can then respond to the group chat letting everybody else know that they will go to the front and greet the guest. I'm able to send a message to a single person, but haven't figured out how to get multiple people on a conversation.
I've tried to start a conversation with a single person and then call the addParticipant endpoint to add others to the conversation, but that hasn't worked for me yet. From what I'm seeing, I can't add somebody until the 1st person accepts the invitation, which poses the problem as I can't be guaranteed that person will accept it.
Am I taking a wrong approach here or am I missing something? I tried to think what code would be helpful here, but didn't think it would help, so if I see that it's needed by follow-ups, I'll post anything relevant to the topic.
The situation you are describing might be best served with a slightly altered solution. This kiosk is the entry point for a guest to contact a set of users and as you have discovered if those users don't respond your guests is left without much recourse.
If you were to change the approach to expose an anonymous meeting for the guest to join, it would be possible to have a UCMA application join and attempt to facilitate the communication between the guest and the users. The UCMA application could facilitate adding the expected users or contacting them and executing a script to notify them of the guests arrival.
You would want to wrap/expose a way (most likely a Web API) to communicate the meeting created by UCMA to the web application as UCWA needs specific information (conferenceUri) in order to join anonymously.
I am working something very similar where I need to be able to send to a number of users at once and avoid the send and accept scenario you mentioned.
So far from my testing and reading this doesn't seem to be possible with just UCWA. What I have been looking into is using the SDKs available for Lync, which are UCMA and the Persistent Chat SDK.
Using these you would need to create your own application which could act as a REST API for preforming the group sending.
Related
Currently I'm working on the MQTT based Chat application where I need to assign
Unique Topics to Users dynamically.
So, I thought of using their IMEI/MobileNumber. But in iOS, we cannot get the IMEI Number so we thought of generating a random IMEI from the backend and assign it to the Users.
Now, My problem is whenever user changes his mobile, the IMEI Number changes and it will be fresh profile again to that user.
If I use based on his Mobile Number, there is a chance when the user doesn't use the sim for 3 months. The connection automatically terminates from the network provider and the same number will be assigned to another new customer(atleast here in india).
Can anyone suggest me a good approach for the Topic Generation?
BTW, I need a Web Chat also and that need to be fetched from database. that is the only reason, I'm focusing on the Topic Generation. So, I will fetch messages based on his topic and show them in the Web Chat.
Do anyone know, how whatsapp maintained their topics?
I thought of using their IMEI/MobileNumber.
Bad design. Have the user create an account (i.e. email) with a password for your service that way no matter what phone or phone number they have, they can still log in and use your app. And make sure you ENCRYPT the user credentials in your database. Start FIRST by building an app with proper security or else you will be hacked 5 minutes after you launch it.
Do anyone know, how whatsapp maintained their topics?
Just because Zuckerberg copies everyone else, doesn't mean you need to copy them. Also, I believe whatsapp created there own version of a MQTT Broker. Hence, it will have an entirely different set of functionality from a regular MQTT Broker.
I want to know the best practice to send presence requests during registration.
I am developing a chat app on android. The user account id is based on phone numbers.
The approach is like this.
Read all contacts from Phone.
Create a list of all phone numbers you need to send presence requests to.
When the list reaches 50 numbers. Send a Multicast message using
XEP-0033. This is to reduce network
calls.
The issue with this approach is that a user normally has 500-600 contacts on his phone or maybe more. On an average the registration process might take 10-12 http calls for presence subscriptions.
Can somebody suggest a better approach to it.
I assume that your framework is something like that of Whatsapp.
Now, for that I can refer you to opensource alternative of Whatsapp that is Kontalk.
You can find the Github code here.
You can go through the code, hope it helps.
I don't know if this is even possible, couldn't find anything usefull on the internet.
I wanted to make an app, that me and some of my friends could send a message trough "my app" and that everyone who has that app, receive the message, without using a phone number.
So basically, same as WhatsApp GroupConversation, but then without using a phone number.
Is this even possible?
If it is possible, could you put me on the right track to start with.
Hope I am clear enough, if not, tell me :)
Edit:
This just pops up in my head (didn't look on internet yet), but what I want, is a kind of a shoutbox.
This is possible, in fact WhatsApp does not use your phone number for this at all.
You simply provide your phone number to asure a unique ID and proof that you are indeed in possession of this phone with the validation SMS.
From there on, your phone number isn't even used anymore.
You can go 2 ways with this;
Create a simple webservice with a database on which you just save and request messages. Maybe make a little difference between get all or get latest message. Anyone, hooking into the group, can just fetch the same data. With the use of GCM push notifications, you can make this pretty instant.
Use XMPP, which is a chat protocol kinda all the chats use. Whatsapp, Google talk, FB messenger... This will provide you with instant messaging just like any other chat app or program you know.
Option 2 is by far the best in final functionality, but be warned that XMPP is quite complex and error prone.
You can look into the asmack and asmackx libraries for Android, which will give you the basic functionality with ease. Going a bit deeper, you'll have to dig into the protocol and really get to know it though.
ps. For both you'll need your own server, however with asmack(x) you are also allowed to use Google's Talk servers for free. Communication will go through your Gmail account. Basically with this you just make your own version of Google Talk.
It is possible by implementing server-client architecture. Your app will use a common database for all the users. whenever an user install your app, he will achieve an unique user ID. if anyone uninstall it, his id will be destroyed. You can track the users from those ID in database. You don't need phone numbers.
I'm having trouble understanding the top level of abstraction of this problem.
The Problem:
Users A and B download application X. A wants to send application-specific data to B. How does user A link with B?
My incredibly messy solution:
- User A clicks a button on the application that opens up a list of contacts. user A selects user B from the list. User B's email address was stored in A's address book. Application creates a sort of "share ID" and sends it to user B via that email address. User B's application gets that ID from the mail, then User A and B use the share ID to connect to a server and share between each other via the sserver.
There must be a better way? The two problems are:
1. It shouldn't need a server (should it? could it be free?)
2. There must be better ways of the users connecting to each other than sending ID's or links etc by gmail.
This solution should be so so simple, but I can't get my head round it. If this question is not sufficient to get a good answer, please please tell me what I need to do to get into the way of thinking about how mobile users can interract with each other as simply as possible, with as few clicks as possible, (Mobile 2.0 or whatever the modern day thing is!)
For example: A mother and a child have an android smart phone. They each download the "ChildLeash" app. Child wishes to configure the app to send updates to Mother, so that Mother can keep track of Child's location and so on. The problem is some how Child needs to tell the app what location Mother is at for the data to be sent to. What is a user-friendly way for Child to Identify Mother's phone? (Mother's IP address? Phone number? Email address? OpenIDs? NFC/Bluetooth?) So that it can then communicate?
You could use push notifications, as provided by the Android Cloud to Device Messaging Framework. There's an Android blog post about this. Problem is, this seems beta and not yet available to all developers (you need a specific signup).
Regarding "IP Adresss", P2P and such, this generally won't work. See: Is peer-to-peer communication over 3G/4G possible for smart phones?
If messages are not urgent, then you could use AlarmManager to have your app wake up every hour or so, and check for new messages by connecting to a server. Not sure that would work for your "ChildLeash" example. Another similar solution would be to use a Service to poll the server.
Usually this sort of interaction would require a server. Which you've kind of faked using email as your medium.
It might be worth looking into peer to peer libraries such as JXTA. There's an android port here: http://code.google.com/p/peerdroid/
EDIT: I just came across this: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/05/android-cloud-to-device-messaging.html Which looks like exactly what you're after.
I'm looking for suggestions for ways to share Android app data between phones running the same app. For example, lets say I have an app that stores a database of book reviews. If person A has a book review that person B doesn't have, what are the options for getting that information from person A's phone to person B's phone?
Currently, I'm aware of the following options:
- Upload data from person A's phone to a server, then download data from server to Person B's phone.
- Write code to have the phones sync up using bluetooth
- Write code to send SMS messages
I'm wondering if there are any more options besides these, and if there's actually a best-practice for accomplishing this?
Ideally, I want the users to simply click a button in the app to make the sharing take place, so I don't want to go down the bluetooth route because that requires the user to do a bit of setup (or assumes they already have set things up in the form of bluetooth settings).
Since the data can be of variable length and potentially large, I believe that would rule out text messaging.
As far as the server route goes, from what I understand this seems to be an ok way of doing things, but my problem is that I have no experience with having users potentially sign in to a server and then uploading data. I don't know of the cost concerns (if any), or of potential security concerns (allowing just anyone to upload data, I'm not sure if I would have to take steps to ensure someone couldn't bypass the app and upload malicious data).
So, can you guys give me suggestions and point me in the right direction? Thanks.
I'm wondering if there are any more options besides these
You could try generating a QR code and scanning it on the other phone. Beyond that, I think you have it mostly covered.
and if there's actually a best-practice for accomplishing this?
That is impossible to answer in the abstract.
Keep the database server side and interface with it via a web service
I too am looking for a solution to this very problem. I'll throw it out there that a fourth, or rather extension of your first option, is to use the Cloud to Device Messaging Framework, though it still requires (as best I can tell) having your own server, though I suppose you wouldn't need to store the database server-side longer than it takes to send the message, provided you keep it under 1024b (or whatever the actual size is).
I don't believe there is a convenient way to monitor/send email in the background. If I could have my app monitor email messages looking for a key subject, then parsing the body, I could probably accomplish what I'm looking for using email as the transport.
The problem with maintaining a server, is that you probably would need to build in a subscription fee to your app to cover the costs of maintaining a server, as one time sales may not be able to cover the ongoing expense.