Arrangement for facilitating plug-and-play call features

Abstract

A telecommunications system infrastructure that facilitates easy insertion of feature software into existing such telecommunications systems and easy integration of the new calling features and their implementing software with existing features and their software. The infrastructure comprises the Lucent Technologies MMCX multimedia communications server (100) and middleware-compliant communications endpoints (101-102) executing the Lucent Technologies MMCX communications middleware (111-112). Feature-implementing software has a modular client/server construction, with feature managers (server modules, 300,350) executing on the MMCX server and feature administration agents (client modules, 303-353, 304-354) executing on the endpoints. The infrastructure provides a context service (120) and a context API (121) for registering an instance of a feature manager (a user policy, 301-302, 351-352) for each user upon that user becoming entitled to the feature, an administration API (360) for communications between feature managers and feature administration agents on the user's endpoint to customize the user's user policies for the user, and a context (a cyberspace meeting room, 200) and the context API for involving the user policies of users who are parties to a call in the call and for communicating call-related events to feature servers and other service-implementing software. Call-related events are passed to user policies involved in the call, and they are given a chance to react to the events by allowing or rejecting the events. Interactions between features are managed by having feature managers register at different priorities with the context service; higher-priority modules are serially given an opportunity to allow or reject events before lower-priority modules.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.