Additional App capabilities

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Exporting an App
• Understanding App Permissions
• Understanding the App & Workspace Lifecycles
  • Creating new Workspaces with the Creation Service
  • Archiving Workspaces
  • Auditing Apps
• Other Platform Capabilities
  • Meetings
  • Chat
  • Audio and Video
  • Assets
  • Workflows

This article highlights additional capabilities to enhance you App experience. For some features, detailed instructions are provided in separate articles. 

Exporting an App

You can export Apps to share configurations with other developers, create new Apps that either extend the functionality or make use of some of the same components. For details, see Exporting an App.

Understanding App Permissions

App permissions ensure for controlled access for team members and administrators. Learn more about managing permissions in Understanding App Permissions.

Understanding the App & Workspace Lifecycles

The lifecycle of an App depends on its purpose and audience. As an App Builder, you know that the Workspace is where data persists for an App. You can create Workspaces using the CafeX interface.

Some Workspaces are short-lived, designed for tasks such as handling a call from a customer. Others are long-term, persisting indefinitely to record or track data across the organization. 

You can use a Workspace to control access to App data. For example, you may configure a Workspace to restrict access so that only specific users can view certain customer data. Alternatively, you might allow all users to share the same data or retrieve it from a dedicated service. In some cases, a Workspace may not store any data at all, allowing all users to use the same Workspace.

The important thing to understand is that the App Studio and CafeX can support all of these scenarios, and your App Users can use the Workspaces to meet their data access needs without you having to redesign solutions for them.

Creating new Workspaces with the Creation Service

It is often not appropriate for users to navigate into a CafeX App to create a new Workspace. You may need to streamline the creation process to bring people into the App interface as quickly as possible, and often users need information to begin using the App. CafeX provides a mechanism for creating Workspaces using an authenticated URL that takes parameters and passes them to the App. For details, check Creating a workspace through Workspace Creation Service.

Archiving Workspaces

By default, Workspaces persist indefinitely. However, if you create multiple Workspaces that your users only use for a brief time, you may eventually find that they are impacting the user’s browser performance.

As an App Builder, you can configure how long a Workspace persists during the periods of User inactivity before CafeX archives the Workspace.

To configure the automatic archive:

1. Navigate to the App Overview page and click the Show information panel () icon at the top right-hand corner of the screen.
2. Click Configure.
3. Click the Configure workspace button.
   
4. Under the Automatic archive section, enable the Archive workspace when inactive toggle.
5. Click Update to save the changes.

When CafeX archives a Workspace, users can no longer view its content. However, the data is not permanently deleted, and a Tenant administrator can always restore the Workspace.

Auditing Apps

It is almost always necessary to report on App usage or audit behavioural patterns within the applications you build. As an App Builder, you can create audit events from the App Studio. CafeX provides an audit log that allows you to retrieve data using an API. 

For details on how to access audit information, see Accessing Audit Information Programmatically. 

For details on how to raise an audit event, check Raising Audit events.

Other Platform Capabilities

This section introduces the basic knowledge and skills for developing Apps in the App Studio. These platform capabilities do not require any additional coding and enable App Users to make use of the built-in Components to start benefiting from the collaborative features they provide.

Meetings

The Meeting Component initiates a real-time browser-based meeting among App Users within the same Workspace. It’s important to realize that Meetings are held within the underlying Workspace, so App Users need to be in the same Workspace to be in the same Meeting. You can save Meeting recordings as Workspace assets to review or apply transcriptions. 

Typical use cases:

• Your App Users need support escalations or handling tasks that need supervisor assistance.
• Your App schedules regular Meetings to review metrics and dashboards.

Chat

The Chat component provides your App with a designated and isolated Chat channel within a Workspace. Workspace members can use the Chat to discuss decisions and use Context Cards to track their outcomes. As an App Builder, it can be difficult to capture all the collaborative work that goes on between team members. Chat can provide your App Users with a way to make free-form decisions, while maintaining the context of your App and Workspace. 

Typical use cases:

• Sharing thoughts or updates asynchronously.
• Tracking the history of decision making.
• Enabling teams to collaborate through free-form decision making.

Audio and Video

These Components allow you to embed video and audio files into your App. Sometimes App Users benefit from these resources more than from written cues. 

Typical use cases:

• Producing training courses and capturing participant feedback.
• Using them along-side the Business Rule Engine to select in-App mentoring for new Users.

Assets

Asset management is one of the most powerful tools for collaborating and sharing documents and resources that may be critical to your business. Each Workspace can contain files relevant to your App. In addition, CafeX Workspaces provide your Users with the ability to share assets between external applications, such as Microsoft Office and Google Drive, without having to update the native sharing permissions for users. This means that documents can stay in their native application, but your App Users can see the latest versions of assets. 

Typical use cases:

• Storing documents critical to your App's functionality.
• Providing App Users with documentation, instructions, or descriptions as reference.
• Displaying web-content, such as reports, from external applications or teams.

Workflows

This section of the knowledge base introduces how External Data Sources can integrate your Apps with web APIs. CafeX Workflows provide a low-code environment to build end-to-end processes with integration and automation capabilities. Automate Workflows to reduce the number of steps and shadow-operations that are difficult to track. As an integration engine, CafeX provides over 300 pre-built connectors that manage access to these applications. Apps can receive triggers or initiate complex business processes. 

Typical use cases:

• Each time a new invoice arrives in your CRM system, you need to create a new Workspace for your App Users to process it.
• Interactions from App Users need to create new records.
• Connections with legacy, on-premise database systems.
• Eliminating silos within applications to unify data into a single view.
• Apps that need to send notifications, or emails, to groups of Users.
• Transforming multi-team, multi-application business processes.
• Manage documents and content using secure management.