Lucent Technologies Inc.

Charles H Parker

Dennis R Sanger

Andrew D Franklin

Toan Chau

Frank J Boyle, Iii

Jane Gambill

Voice calls between multimedia workstations (1937-1939) of a LAN-based client-server multimedia communications system (1911) and telephones (1918-1919) of a telephone system (1912) are effected by an interface that comprises a pair of ISDN ports (1920 and 1940) interconnected by an ISDN link (1910) and that transfers ISDN control signals and user communications between the LAN (1936) and the telephone switching fabric (1916), and by proxy-user client software (21210 and 21212) that executes on the server (1933) of the multimedia system and converts control signals between the ISDN signals of the ISDN interface and a call processor (1914) of a telephone switching system (1913), and the middleware signaling of the server and its client workstations. The proxy-user client software comprises an object-oriented programming object, and each telephone that is engaged in a call with a workstation is represented in the multimedia system by its own instance (21210-1 to 21210-2) of the object.

Communicating between diverse communications environments

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.

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Broomfield, CO, United States of America

Charles H Parker