12sprints is a new collaboration tool from SAP that was in stealth mode for a while and now has surfaced with a bang.
12sprints is part of a new product category called collaborative decision-making. Collaborative decision-making provides tools that bring people together with the latest information and analysis or decision techniques to drive towards a particular outcome. Unlike products in the market that offer general collaboration platforms like Microsoft SharePoint, Google Wave, or Salesforce Chatter, 12sprints is a specialized application for goal-oriented work that can be used in conjunction with any of these products. [SOURCE]
12sprints has a REST API that is still in development and which was introduced on SDN recently.
We decided to work on two simple use cases to test out the REST API from 12 sprints. By using ESME’s action framework - in particular using the HTTP Post action- we enabled ESME users to interact with 12sprints via particular message tags. The responses from the 12sprints REST API are then posted to ESME so that users can take the information and use it for later processing.
Note: The authentication for the 12sprints REST API is currently based on basic authentication. The syntax of the authentication is [username]:[password] that is uuencoded
Note: I would love to show screenshots from 12sprints with the created objects but, since 12sprints is still in beta, publication of screenshots isn’t permitted.
Use case 1: Creating an activity
The first use case was the creation of a 12sprints activity from ESME. The action takes the message string and creates a 12sprints activity with the activity title being the message text. The resulting activity id is returned to the user as a message.
The syntax of the action is:
https://[username]%40[password]@beta.12sprints.com/v1/activities header:Content-Type=text%2fxml <activity name=”%s”></activity>
Use case 2: Creating a decision
The second use case was the creation of a decision in a particular activity and the idea is the tag of the message is the activity ID which is necessary to create data objects. The message contents are then used as the contents of the decision. The action is fired based on messages that contain the word “choice”.
The syntax of the action is:
https://[username]%40[password]@beta.12sprints.com/v1/activities/%25t/items header:Content-Type=text%2fxml <item name=”Decision item from ESME”><method_item><method_type name=”Decision”/><decision_item><goal><description>%s</description></goal></decision_item></method_item></item>
Current restrictions
This functionality is currently not part of our committed code base. I used a patch from Ethan Jewett to add the action-related functionality to repost the response of the HTTP Post action. It isn’t committed, because we are still working on the optimal functionality that doesn’t compromise our existing concepts.
If you want to play with this integration, it is currently live on our Performance Instance in the cloud
Plans
These two uses were just first steps in our planned deeper integration with 12sprints. We decided to use to actions, because they are relatively easy to implement and are easy enough for most end-users to use. For more complicated use cases, we are looking at ESME bots as the more appropriate programming model. For example, we have one idea of taking an ESME conversation and creating a 12sprints activity with all the individuals and messages being transferred to the activity. Other ideas involve sending status messages from 12sprints (activity changes, etc.) back to ESME so that users can follow activities without having to login on to 12sprints. Another crazy idea is to use “+1″ and “-1″ in ESME to express positive or negative reactions to particular activities.
