Team Connect

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Architecture
Team Connect Screenshot

Inspiration

Team Connect is inspired by the daily challenges we face when connecting with fellow colleagues on a daily basis with the traditional communication tools available to us. In a post COVID world we are increasingly dependent on enterprise messaging platforms. However due to bandwidth issues on the server and connectivity to the server often we face call drops and outages. So the inspiration was to create an additional / alternative communication tool that would be embedded into PEGA that as developers and end users we can use to communicate with our colleagues that would be simply peer to peer and not dependent on the strained communication platform servers

What it does

Team Connect is a PEGA component that allows end users on PEGA portal to engage with each other using real time text chat and audio calls

How I built it

Team Connect was built purely on the PEGA 8 Community Edition server enabled for the Hackathon. I did some digging into webRTC standards and APIs and decided on Peer JS as a suitable candidate to extend the capability to PEGA. After that it was an extremely exciting exercise in combining front end technology like React with webRTC APIs in PeerJS and integrating them on to the PEGA 8 platform.

Challenges I ran into

The main challenge was to seamlessly integrate the React component with PEGA. While I learnt React using Functional components, I had to refactor all of that using React class components to integrate with PEGA. Perhaps there may be a way around this, but did not have the time to research that fully. Something I intend to explore post the submission.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I entered the hackathon late and had little more than a week to implement the idea. Given that I am quite happy that the outcome is a minimum viable product that can be deployed and utilized by consumers of the component.