Message distribution system and method for providing notification(s)

• US 7,509,304 B1
• Filed: 02/24/2003
• Issued: 03/24/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 06/26/2002
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Garrett, Phil, Knight, Holly, Pather, Shyamalan, Nilakantan, Niranjan
• Primary Examiner(s): Fleurantin; Jean B
• Application Number:
  US10/373,328
• Time in Patent Office: 2,220 Days
• Field of Search: 707 1- 10, 707100-1041, 707200-206, 709217-219, 709224-225, 709/206, 709/207, 719314-318
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9535 Search customisation based on user profiles and personalisation
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/958 Organisation or management of web site content, e.g. publishing, maintaining pages or automatic linking
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 12/1859 adapted to provide push services, e.g. data channels
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 51/224 providing notification on incoming messages, e.g. pushed notifications of received messages
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99933 Query processing, i.e. searching

Abstract

The present invention relates to a system and methodology to facilitate automated delivery of notifications to notification sinks while mitigating interface development and deployment within the framework of a notification platform. One or more message delivery channels are provided with the notification platform that can be associated with an extension component for delivering the notifications. The extension component automatically wraps an underlying message in a protocol associated with a notification sink such as wrapping a message post from a notification source within a common delivery protocol. The extension component can inherit delivery properties from an underlying platform interface associated with the delivery channels in order to mitigate coding and development details involved when utilizing or invoking the platform interface. Furthermore, the extension component enables various message protocols to be modeled as separate objects without having to implement higher-level or more complex aspects of the underlying interface.

Claims

1. A notification system embodied on at least one of a system memory or a computer storage media comprising the following components executing on one or more processors:

at least one delivery channel for delivering notifications in accordance with a notification platform;

an extension component associated with the at least one delivery channel to format the notifications according to communications characteristics of at least one notification sink, the at least one notification sink is selected based on an inferred likelihood of being a notification recipient'"'"'s preferred notification sink, the inferred likelihood of being a notification recipient'"'"'s preferred notification sink is based upon the recipient'"'"'s contextual information and net expected values of the notifications to the recipient, wherein the contextual information is based on at least one of the user'"'"'s current location, user'"'"'s state of attention, user'"'"'s current activity, or notification sink currently available to the user, wherein the net expected value is based at least upon cost of disruption to the user in the user'"'"'s current state of attention by employing the one or more notification sinks and the context sensitive value of the information; and

at least one SQL server to distribute information from one or more event sources that generate notifications to the at least one notification sink that receives information from the event sources, wherein the at least one SQL server processes a plurality of event sources and performs join operations to distribute notifications to the at least one notification sink.

2. The system of claim 1, further comprising at least one subscription that is obtained to determine which of the event sources cause automated notifications to occur at the at least one notification sink.

3. The system of claim 1, the at least one delivery channel is associated with a platform interface that facilitates delivery of notification events.

4. The system of claim 3, the at least one delivery channel includes a socket interface component providing a delivery protocol for routing messages to the at least one notification sinks.

5. The system of claim 3, the extension component facilitates operation of the delivery channel by at least one of exposing or inheriting features of the platform interface that are called when delivering notifications to the at least one notification sink.

6. The system of claim 1, the extension component includes automated formatting and delivery options for routing messages through the delivery channel.

7. The system of claim 6, the extension component posts a message that is routed to a URL address.

8. The system of claim 6, the extension component automatically generates protocol packets that wraps message in a delivery protocol in order to present the message in a suitable form at the at least one notification sink.

9. The system of claim 1, the at least one delivery channel include transmission of formatted notifications to one or more recipients at a delivery target, the delivery targets including at least one of a desktop target, a mobile target, or a service target.

10. The system of claim 1, the at least one delivery channel creates a formatted message utilizing parameterized data then invokes a delivery class provided by an operating system to transport the message to an intended recipient.

11. The system of claim 1, the at least one delivery channel is configured via at least one of an Application Description File (ADF) or a Notification Platform configuration file.

12. The system of claim 1, at least one of the delivery channel and the extension component employ a communications protocol to deliver information to the at least one notification sink, the communications protocol includes at least one of HTTP, SMTP, FTP, TCP/IP, voice encoded extensions, video protocols, image protocols, wireless protocols, Wireless Mark-up Language (WML) protocols, authentication protocols, authorization protocols, security protocols, SSL, IPSec, IKE, Kerberos, Diffie-Hellman protocols, tunneling protocols, asynchronous protocols, routing protocols, XML protocols, WSDL protocols, or SOAP protocols.

13. The system of claim 1, the notification platform includes at least one of a message queuing function or a Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC) function.

14. The system of claim 1, the extension component facilitates processing a notification as a message body and packetizing the message body within a transmission envelope.

15. The system of claim 14, the message body contains information generated from an event source that is to be delivered to a notification sink, the information includes at least one of alerts, updates, postings, images, video, voice data, delivery information, time information, header fields, ID fields, subject fields, subscriber information, or priority information relating to the urgency of a notification.

16. The system of claim 1, further comprising a protocol formatter to format the notifications and a response parser to analyze whether a notification was delivered to the at least one notification sink.

17. The system of claim 1, the extension component is provided as a class supporting one or more protocol object declarations.

18. The system of claim 1, the at least one delivery channel is configured via a configuration file, the configuration file including at least one of a channel name, a protocol name, an argument, a dll assembly, a protocol provider class name, a user name, a password, a domain name, a group name, a connection limit, a shutdown value, a port name, a server name, a content type, an encoding type, or a Universal Resource Locater (URL) field.

19. The system of claim 1, further comprising a context component that updates at least one of a local or a remote database with information relating to at least one user'"'"'s current state, the current state employed to deliver the notifications.

20. A notification system embodied on at least one of a system memory or a computer storage media executing on one or more processors, comprising:

means for encoding at least one notification within a message body;

means for wrapping the message body in a transmission envelope;

means for delivering the transmission envelope to one or more notification sinks that receive the at least one notification, the one or more notification sinks are selected among a plurality of notification sinks based upon an inferred likelihood of being a notification recipient'"'"'s preferred notification sink, the inferred likelihood of being a notification recipient'"'"'s preferred notification sink is based upon the recipient'"'"'s contextual information and net expected values of the notifications to the recipient, wherein the contextual information is based on at least one of the user'"'"'s current location, user'"'"'s state of attention, user'"'"'s current activity, or notification sink currently available to the user, wherein the net expected value is based at least upon cost of disruption to the user in the user'"'"'s current state of attention by employing the one or more notification sinks and the context sensitive value of the information; and

means to distribute information from one or more event sources that generate notifications to the one or more notification sinks, wherein the means processes a plurality of event sources and performs join operations to distribute notifications to the one or more notification sinks.

21. The system of claim 20, the means for wrapping includes a packetized data structure.

22. The system of claim 21, the packetized data structure is in a different data protocol from the message body.

23. The system of claim 21, the packetized data structure is in a similar data protocol to the message body.

24. The system of claim 20, further comprising means for generating a signal to communicate the packetized data structure, the signal transmitted to at least one notification sink.