The Mobile Informer platform is a mobility environment built specifically to support mobile applications that integrate directly with Maximo. The platform enables rapid development of lightweight, extensible applications that allow for direct communication with Maximo via web services and comply with open standards.

Deployed within Maximo, the Mobile Informer server platform requires no middleware software. Mobile Informer manages the heavy-lifting and complexity of mobilizing Maximo, letting you design custom user interfaces specifically to support each business process, while taking advantage of the wide range of native features available in each mobile environment.

The Informer platform management is separated into two Maximo applications: Informer Developer, and Informer Administration. Informer Developer is provided for developers of Informer applications and advanced system administrators. It provides access to all aspects of both configuration and administration of Informer. The Informer Administration application is a limited version of Informer Developer and only contains the functions relevant to the administration of deployed applications.

This document covers the use of the "Informer Administration" Maximo Application.

The List page is used to search for available Informer profiles and provides access to both the Advanced Search and Where Clause search features.

The Sessions and Queue Processor, Select Action menu items are available from this page and can be used to view the current global active Informer user sessions and queue processor activity respectively.

The Users tab allows specific users to be granted access to the selected profile. It also allows the user’s active notifications to be viewed and removed if desired.

The Devices tab allows an administrator to manage the devices that are being used on the selected profile. While Informer is not designed to be a full device management platform, basic management functionality is provided to block and wipe application data, in addition to viewing application logs and screenshots.

On the Android platform it is possible to implement full device management capabilities such as the ability to remotely lock and factory reset the device. This capability must be implemented and enforced by the application through the Informer client library.

The administrator may set a particular device’s log level and then request the logs from that device. This can be very useful when troubleshooting a remote user issue where physical access to the device may not be possible. Each device record displays the current log level and the date the log level was confirmed by the device. An administrator can enter a new log level in the Log Level field and once saved, a push message will be sent to the device to update the log level. Once the log level has been set on the device, the device will confirm the new log level by setting the Current Log Level field.

Clicking the Refresh button will update the visible device records so that after a request has been submitted an administrator can watch for the updated value without needing to reload the whole profile record.

Once the log level has been set the current device log can be retrieved by clicking the Request Log button. This will create a new PENDING status log request entry in the Logs table under the Logs sub-tab and a push request will be sent to the device to return its current log set. If push notifications are not supported, the requests will be issued during the next polling cycle, instead. Once the device returns the current log the status will be changed to COMP and a log icon will be displayed.

Clicking on the log icon will open the log in a Maximo dialog.

Clicking the Refresh button on the Logs table will update the log table status without requiring the whole profile record to be refreshed. This is useful to monitor for a new log entry when an immediate device response is expected.

Selecting the Reconcile All User Notifications action will cause all notifications for all users to be reevluated for accuracy. Please note that this could take several minutes depending on the number of users and the complexity of the notifications.

Know Issues:

Issue 6150: Update message parameters not used

The Push Notifications action displays a dialog allowing the user to configure push notifications for the iOS Apple Push Notification Service(APNS) and Android Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) push notification frameworks.

The Name field contains the name of the application, as registered with the respective service. The Type indicates whether it is Android (GCM)or iOS (APNS). The message field contains a generic message that will be delivered when one or more updates occur to existing user notifications. The Update Message field is the message to push, which can contain numerical parameters such as {0}, {1}, {2}, that will be replaced by the parameters provided in index order. The Update Message Parameters field contains a comma separated list of attributes that will be substituted into the message. The Description is an arbitrary description for the push notification. The Sender ID is required by the GCM server, whereas the Attach Certificate is used by iOS. The password is the password required only for iOS for decrypting the Attached Certificate. The Sound is the name of the sound file to be played on the device when the message arrives. Finally, the Content Where Clause is an arbitrary where clause that can be evaluated against the newly-changed data to check for a match, which will be indicated to the device via the push message to trigger content-conditional behavior.

As devices subscribe to the profile, if they opt to receive push notifications the device will be listed in the Devices table. Once a device has registered, specific features such as sound, message, and application icon badging can be turned on or off on a per device basis.

The Send Test Message allows a test push message to be sent to a selected device. This is useful when trying to troubleshoot connectivity or device refresh issues.

The Applications action allows a system administrator to view the available Informer application packages for the selected profile.

The Name field is the name of the application and often matches the profile. The Title is a short description of the application. The Type is either ANDROID or IOS depending on the application package. The Version name is the semantic version number provided by the developer. Finally the Application Link is the URL where the application can be downloaded from, which will be included in the communication template if an application link is sent to a user from the Users tab.

The application deployment page is configurable and is based on a Velocity template, but a sample deployment page for the Android application shown above would look similar to the following:

The Sessions action allows the user to view all active session information including the session key, which can be matched to log event entries, the user name, the last time an action was performed on the session, and when the session will expire. The session can also be forced to expire by deleting the record.

The Monitor action allows an administrator to view current state of the Informer processing queues and their processors, as well as performance information if available. When an action occurs within Maximo that may impact a record on a device the action information is put into a queue to be processed in the background. This ensures that the Maximo UI is never impacted by the evaluation of records destined for mobile devices. To ensure that Informer remains scalable, the queue is designed for high volume parallel processing across multiple threads and multiple nodes within a cluster. Being able to view the state of the various threads across the nodes in the cluster is key to understanding the system health and performance.

Note that when the Maximo system is in Admin Mode, queue processing is suspended.

There are three categories of Queue Processor: Notification, Catalog, and Push.

Profile Groups allow an administrator to alter the application behavior based on one or more assigned Profile Options that were configured by the application developer. The Group name is an arbitrary name assigned by the administrator that is used to group one or more options into a logical grouping that can be assigned to one or more users. Profile Options are cumulative for a user, aggregated across all groups that the user belongs to.

The assigned users must be valid users on the currently selected Informer profile. Clicking the Import Users from Group allows the administrator to select a Maximo security group and import all the users of that group, first to the profile and then to the Profile Group.

To assign multiple users to a Profile Group click the Select Users button and select one or more profile users to assign to the Profile Group.

Options tab provides access to assign Profile Options to the selected Profile Group. Clicking the Select Options button allows the user to select one or more Profile Options defined by the application developer and associated with the Informer profile.

Selecting the Refresh All Catalog Preloads action will cause all preloaded catalogs to be marked as invalid and queued to be regenerated. Please note that depending on the number of catalogs and the complexity of the catalog structures, this operation can take a minutes or hours before the preloads finish generating. When each Catalog finishes, its corresponding preload timestamp field will be updated in the Catalogs table on the Catalogs tab.

Selecting the Activate Profile select action menu item causes the profile to become active and registers the listeners within the Maximo system required to capture events that are relevant to the profile and send notifications to the users as defined by the profile.

Before the Profile can be activated, all Catalogs have been initialized. Profile activation will trigger a temporary increase in the Catalog Queue Processors as the Profile checks for any changes it missed while it was deactivated.

Deactivating a profile stops all listeners from capturing system events relevant to the profile and prevents application users from accessing the profile and if connected, the application itself.