Changes for Version 1.5
The latest version of IM an Expert replaces the Version 1.0 of the system, which was released in March 2011. For the Version 1.5 of IM an Expert release, there are several feature additions and software updates.
Features that this update package enables
Support of resource forests
Version 1.0 of IM an Expert did not work for organizations where Lync was set up with a resource forest configuration.This kind of configuration has a set of users who have information such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) address in a different domain and forest from the one that contains the users’ actual user accounts. Therefore, when the users visit the IM an Expert webpage, the site cannot locate the information about these users. To resolve this issue, Version 1.5 of IM an Expert improves the way that the SIP, name, and email address of a user are retrieved so that the user can be searched in resource forests and in the current forest. IM an Expert now offers a sophisticated highly-configurable mechanism to let admins specify how user identities are resolved from Active Directory.
Content-type adaptation
If a message that is sent by IM an Expert cannot be received by the client, then the system of IM an Expert will automatically switch to plain text and use the plain text for the rest of the conversation after the system resends the current message. For example, some Lync 2010 clients cannot handle HTML messages. If IM an Expert detects it has sent a message to a client that cannot handle HTML, it will automatically switch to plain text and use the plain text for the rest of the conversation after resending the current message. The occurrence of the adaptation is governed by the SIP error code that IM an Expert receives when it tries to relay the first message in the conversation. The BotSipErrorCodesForPlainTextResend configuration parameter can be used to specify the list of SIP error codes for which content-type adaptation should be tried.
Message content-type specification
Messages can be sent as plain text or HTML code. Users can specify this behavior by using the BotMessageContentType parameter in the Imx.config file.
Lync 2010 Mobile and Outlook Web Access
Version 1.5 of IM an Expert supports Lync 2010 Mobile client and Outlook Web Access (OWA). For example, Version 1.5 of IM an Expert can work with iPad, iPhone, and Windows Phone.
Run as service
Version 1.5 of IM an Expert can be configured to be run as Windows service. This behavior lets IM an Expert be configured to start automatically when a server that hosts the Bot restarts.
Note The Bot can be still run as an executable.
Conversation following
If a candidate answerer does not want to answer a question invitation they receive through IM, the candidate answerer now has the option of subscribing to the conversation by typing the "follow" message in response to the invite. After the dialog between the asker and another answerer, all followers will be emailed a link to the transcript of the dialog on the IM an Expert website. On the IM an Expert website, the followers can also add follow-up comments and additional answers.
Usage statistics on homepage
Administrators can now display usage statistics on the IM-an-Expert homepage. This includes a stacked bar chart of the ratings that are assigned to answered questions and other statistics such as the average time to answer and average number of users who are contacted to obtain an answerer.
Memory management
The Bot should now consume less memory on the server on which it is running, especially when the Bot is running for prolonged periods. To do this, Version 1.5 of IM an Expert stores less in memory and periodically clears in-memory data structures.
Support for more sophisticated PageCrawler regular expressions
The PageCrawler regular expressions now support multiple regular expressions for the same page and multiple match groups for a page within the same regular expression. This lets administrators extract multiple items from a webpage by using a single regular expression, multiple regular expressions, or some combination of the two.
Resetting Bot status
Version 1.5 of IM an Expert lets administrators set the Bot’s Lync status to variable after the Bot’s Lync Status was set to "Always Online."
In Version 1.0 of IM an Expert, as soon as the Bot was set to an "Always Online" state, it could not be undone by IM an Expert.
Features that this update package enables
SIP address normalization
In Version 1.0 of IM an Expert, SIP addresses were not being normalized. In companies with uppercase domain names, this caused a non-match between user SIP addresses as far as we knew them. This issue is resolved in Version 1.5 of IM an Expert so that IM an Expert normalizes all SIP addresses by lowercasing the sip and the domain portions and leaving the username portion unchanged.
PageCrawler configuration
Version 1.5 of IM an Expert corrects errors that occur with parsing of special fields. For example, Version 1.5 of IM an Expert corrects errors that occur with parsing of email address, SIP, and SIPALIAS. These special fields are replaced by the current user’s email address, SIP, and SIP alias.
Website viewstate validation
Occasionally, users would receive a "validation of viewstate MAC failed exception when they use forms on the IM an Expert website. This issue is resolved by Version 1.5 of IM an Expert.
