Figure: Chat Session View
The Stardust Portal provides real time interactive collaboration within the context of a process instance. Participants can communicate in the familiar chat format and can concurrently review process instance artifacts in the Stardust Portal. As the chat progresses, each message is added to the chat transcript, which is saved as a process attachment in the current context.
Figure: Chat Session View
In case the active process has enabled process attachments, the Chat icon appears in the toolbar of an activity execution view in the Workflow Execution Perspective. Click the icon to open the Chat View and start a chat session.
Figure: Chat
The chat initiator and the user who started the chat
are displayed under the Selected Users heading.
The chat session
remains open until the initiating operator closes the Chat view by
clicking the 
icon.
To invite users, enter or choose them in the Select User section. Type the first few letters of an operator's first or last name in the entry field to begin selecting users for the chat session. As you type, the system searches for Stardust operators whose first or last name matches the entered text. Note that the search is per default case-sensitive with the exception of the first letter. You can change to case-insensitive search by setting the property Carnot.Client.Search.CaseSensitive in your carnot.properties file to false.
Click the operators that you want to invite as users to the chat. Alternatively, use the arrow keys to select an operator and click the Enter key. Each invited operator is added to the Selected Users list and is notified of the chat session invitation.
Figure: Invited Users
Messages sent during the chat session are visible to all
users listed as logged-in users in the Selected Users
part. To remove a user from the chat session, click the
icon next to the
user.
Operators who are invited to participate in a Chat session receive a notification in the upper right corner of the Stardust Portal. The Alerts entry indicates incoming chat sessions by the number of chat sessions in brackets. Clicking the Alerts entry displays the chat with the user name and an image of size 32*32.
Figure: Click the blinking Alerts entry.
Click on Join my chat to participate in the according chat session.
Figure: Joining the Chat
To send a chat message, type the message text in the Enter Message field and format as desired using the formatting options on the toolbar.
Click the Send button to send the message. All sent messages are broadcast to the entire group of chat session users and added to the chat transcript.
Figure: Sending a Message
Links to documents may be sent to all chat session participants,
who may then choose to open the documents by clicking the links.
To send a document link, click the icon next to a document and drag it
from the Document Tree to the receivers Chat Dialog area.
Figure: Drag a Document to the Chat Dialog.
Chat messages are broadcast to all participants as they are sent and added as a separate line in the chat transcript.
Figure: Chat Log
To save the transcript to the current context as a process attachment, you have to close the chat first via the Close icon in the toolbar:
Figure: Close the Chat Session
After saving, the chat protocol is listed in the process attachments section.
Figure: Chat Protocol as Process Attachment
To view it, click on its entry to open the appropriate document viewer. Please refer to the chapter Viewing and Editing Documents for details on viewing documents.
The following video demonstrates how to use the Chat and Notes functionality in the Stardust Portal:
Note that this video was created in an earlier Stardust version than the current. Some functionality or design might have changed meanwhile.
You find more training videos for related and other topics on our Self-Learning Trainings Stardust Wiki page.
