How can you enhance TRIRIGA Workplace Services Apps with A.I.?

Introducing the TRIRIGA Assistant: Enhancing TRIRIGA Workplace Services Apps with Artificial Intelligence

By Alex Melamed

Wouldn’t it be nice if your office started to act more like a team player? For employees, that would mean effortless engagement with workplace services. For facility managers, that would mean more engaged and delighted occupants who provide feedback to keep the workplace not just humming but evolving.

IBM TRIRIGA just announced numerous enhancements to the workplace experience in the latest release (10.6.1). Among these enhancements, the all new TRIRIGA Assistant. The TRIRIGA Assistant is a smart, conversational A.I. assistant, which is the same frictionless technology that we all have in our homes, and which is another way to meet the ever-growing expectations of the workforce. This A.I. assistant can help users find and reserve meeting rooms, report maintenance issues correctly, and even locate where a colleague sits. And that is just the beginning.

With the introduction of the TRIRIGA Assistant into the facility management portfolio, IBM has invited Watson to the office. The TRIRIGA Assistant is powered by IBM’s Watson Assistant platform. It’s robust and able to be extended to support custom A.I. skills and capabilities within an enterprise-grade secure cloud…

[Admin: Although it’s not an official IBM offering, here’s an intriguing avatar POC demo from the same Assistant team.]

How can I make my facilities even smarter?

By Kendra DeKeyrel

A.I. also helps deliver a more engaging workplace experience. That’s why we included TRIRIGA Assistant in this new release. It’s a smart, conversational A.I. assistant that allows users to engage with the spaces around them. Imagine how much time employees can save by simply asking an app to reserve a conference room, order catering, submit a service request or locate an office. It’s the same frictionless technology that we all have in our homes, and another way to meet the ever-growing expectations of your workforce…

UX: What licenses are required to develop UX Perceptive apps?

I have installed the IBM TRIRIGA application platform and it is up and running. Next, I want to develop Perceptive apps. What licenses do I need to develop Perceptive apps? Can I get a sample link or resource to start any sample apps?

[Admin: This post is related to the 08.30.16 post about how licenses work in UX, and the 12.11.15 post about the UX framework. This post is also related to the UX Articles, UX Videos, and UX Lessons blog pages.]

UX: How do you create and save a record in UX via a workflow?

I’ve got most of this worked out. So I can trigger a workflow from a UX web page. But I am stuck on how to take data created in the UX application, feed it to the workflow, place that data into record fields, and then create a draft record. This is the UX code that is feeding data back to TRIRIGA. The data is valid. I am just stumped on how to feed it into a workflow. Any ideas?

var newRec = {

triHoursNU: vFixedTotal,

triControlNumberCN: triControlNumberCN,

triDateTX: mm + “/” + dd + “/” + yyyy, 

triIdTX: triIdTX,

triNameTX: fName + ” ” + lName

};

console.log(newRec);

this.$.timeLogQueryDs.createRecord(newRec, TriPlatDs.RefreshType.BOTH, 

“createLog”, “create” ) 

.then(function(){

this.$.toastBlue2.show(); 

}.bind(this));

When you create a record, let’s say you have a data source called “peopleDs”, you create an object and then pass it to the create method of the data source. The names should match the data source exposed field names. I also recommend looking at the documentation for your TRIRIGA instance at: /p/web/doc.

[Admin: The same question is also posted in the main UX Framework forum. To see other related posts, use the UX Framework tag or Perceptive tag.]

How do you equip your TRIRIGA chariot with fierce stallions?

There’s an old metaphor originating from Plato that compares the soul to that of a chariot with a pair of winged horses. Chariots of the gods were equipped with two good horses, while us mere mortals were given one good horse and one bad, unruly horse, depicting the conflicts of the soul. Due to this imbalance, we would always face hardships. But those of us who could put that unruliness to use could potentially rise high enough to hang with the gods.

What does this have to do with IBM TRIRIGA and hanging out at TRIMAX this week? Not a whole lot, I just like to throw out fascinating metaphors. However, if you’re looking to power up your facilities “chariot” with the fiercest of good stallions, and corral the unruliness of unused data,  you may want to read on.

The five fierce stallions of 2017

When it comes to fierce stallions, why have 2 when you can have 5? And when you’re talking about investments around TRIRIGA, the more the merrier.  Here are the top 5 stallions driving the chariot of your facilities management efforts this year:

• 1. New lease accounting standards drive compliance domination…
• 2. Analytics help you understand the performance of your chariot…
• 3. Cloud isn’t just for mythical gods…
• 4. Mobility enables the business to soar from anywhere…
• 5. User experience (UX) drives Herculean engagement…

[Admin: What does TRIRIGA mean? A tririga (trī-ˈrē-gə) is a team of three horses yoked three abreast, commonly associated with the use of chariots during the Roman Empire. To see other related posts, use the TRIMAX tag.]

UX: Why are you logged out when switching from desktop to iPad?

Our client is experiencing logout issues when using Perceptive apps on their iPad.

The link to the Perceptive app is passing through a DMZ, and upon initial login, the users are able to navigate the apps on the iPad without issue. But when a new session is started on their desktop, they are logged out of their current session on the iPad. After the users log back in, there are 2 consistent behaviors: (1) the iPad log constantly force-closes the session on the desktop or (2) there is a back and forth between the desktop and iPad sessions.

We’re unsure of how, or if, SSO is playing a part in this, or if we’ve missed a setting that will enable both sessions to stay open for as long as the timeout setting allows. We have attempted to use this solution (IV96586), but have not seen improvement.

When one SSO session is opened, it will log out the user from any other locations. I would ask users to stick with one device and avoid using multiple devices. If they need to use the apps and their desktops simultaneously, then you should provide them with a link to the UX apps for their desktops.

[Admin: This post is related to the 06.10.17 post about the UX session timeout on the iPad. To see other related posts, use the Timeout tag.]

UX: How do you get access to the new UX apps (Service Request)?

How do I get access to the new UX apps listed on this page? We are on TRIRIGA 3.5.3 and 10.5.0. But we only see the Space Assessment and Space Management Perceptive apps in our environment.

The Move Me and Group Move applications were added in the Application 10.5.2. The Workplace Services portal, Service Request, and Room Reservation were added in the Application 10.5.3. The apps are delivered in the Application Upgrade. When you upgrade from Application 10.5.0 to 10.5.3, you will see the new apps.

[Admin: To see other related posts, use the UX Framework tag or Perceptive tag.]

UX: Why does Group Move UX app stop working after 10.5.3 upgrade?

I’m seeing an issue in the Group Move UX app. After application upgrade to 10.5.3, the Group Move application stopped working on “Production Mode”. After activating “Development Mode”, the Group Move worked again. So I think the problem came from the vulcanized code of 10.5.3 OM package. For now, I’ve just vulcanized the Group Move application manually and it works now. Have you seen a similar issue?

We confirmed the defect related to the vulcanized code for the Group Move UX app. It is being addressed for the next full release under APAR IJ01969. Meanwhile, the manual solution you have followed is the workaround. Here are the details:

“The Group Move UX Perceptive application should no longer contain syntax errors and the search feature should work now. Customers who run into this issue on previous app versions can vulcanize the application following the steps outlined on this wiki page. (Tri-IJ01969-5886)”

[Admin: To see other related posts, use the Vulcanize tag.]

UX: How do you export components from one environment to another?

I have a couple of software development life cycle (SDLC) questions about Perceptive apps using the TRIRIGA UX Framework:

• How do you export changes to Perceptive app components from one environment to another, without exporting the whole application? Example components include web view files and data sources. Currently, if we only change and test a data source or web view in Dev, we cannot figure out how to export them from the Dev environment and import them into the system integration testing (SIT) environment.
• How do you add an existing data source to an existing model? We only found an Add button to add a new data source. We would like to associate a pre-defined data source to a model.

TRIRIGA currently supports exporting of the whole app, so you cannot export only a data source. For web view files, you have the option to use the WebViewSync tool to pull the files from one environment and push them into another.

About adding an existing data source, the data sources were designed to be part of a model and that’s why there is no button to add an existing data source to a model. However, you can manually associate them by using the Association tab.

[Admin: To see other related posts, use the UX Framework tag.]

What is the IBM TRIRIGA compatibility with Apple iPads?

I’m not sure if the supported OS list includes iOS officially. With the advent of iPad Pro devices, the line between iPhone-like devices and computers gets further blurred. After all, an iPad Pro begins to feel a lot like a MacBook Air. There is support for Safari on a computer as well, and generally the move is to become device-agnostic.

But I need to put forth some guidance about iPad Pro devices and TRIRIGA. My initial observation is that some basic functions don’t work correctly, perhaps HTML5 related? For example, rendering the portal. The page starts loading correctly, then the screen jiggers a bit and seems to stabilize, but scroll bars never appear and the user cannot move up or down. I’ve tested in both Safari and Chrome.

Official support of IBM TRIRIGA on iPad is limited to the IBM TRIRIGA UX Framework and Perceptive Applications. Traditional TRIRIGA, portal, and non-UX applications are only supported on Windows and Mac OS X operating systems when running Safari, Chrome, Edge, Firefox, or IE11. Although a lot of non-UX TRIRIGA will load on an iPad, you will run into some limitations as you have noted above…

UX: How do you “vulcanize” your UX application?

[Updated 08.07.17 for TRIRIGA 3.5.3 and 10.5.3]

A typical TRIRIGA UX application will initially load hundreds of resource files which translate to the same number of HTTP requests from the server to the browser. This remains true in the succeeding requests of these resources even if they are already cached by the browser. The browser still makes the same number of HTTP requests to the server then waits for the server response to either load it from the cache or from the latest version from the server. This great number of HTTP requests is costly and can affect the performance of your application. One way of cutting down this cost is to concatenate these web resources into a single file through the Vulcanize build tool created by the Google Polymer team.

The TRIRIGA team developed a tool called tri-vulcanize that specifically vulcanizes TRIRIGA UX component files. It pulls the component files from the TRIRIGA server based on the given view to vulcanize, then uses the Google Vulcanize build tool to concatenate these files into a single file.

Prerequisites:

1. Upgrade TRIRIGA Platform version 3.5.2 to be able to vulcanize UX applications.
2. Upgrade TRIRIGA Application version 10.5.2 to get the vulcanized Perceptive applications.
3. Download the tools here.
4. For version 3.5.2 and 10.5.2, follow the steps here in setting up the UX metadata: Setup the UX metadata for 3.5.2 and 10.5.2 for customized and new UX applications.
5. For version 3.5.3 and 10.5.3 and later, follow the steps here in setting up the UX metadata: How to vulcanize your UX application starting 3.5.3, 10.5.3 and later for customized and new UX applications.

When do I vulcanize my UX Application?

You will need to vulcanize your UX application whenever there are changes to your view files or platform component files. These usually happen when a developer has updated your view files or from application OMs and platform upgrades. It is best to re-vulcanize your UX applications when any of these changes occurred, even if you are not sure that there were UX component and application files getting updated in the upgrade…