The Engagement Management functional block focuses on the interaction with all internal and external actors that can be people or software agents, representing customers, employees, partners, 3rd parties, etc. The user interactions can include providing information or activating processes and functions that are implemented by components from different functional blocks using the corresponding APIs. It is important to understand that this functional block is a presentation layer only, it does not store any processes, functions or operational data, only technical functions needed to provide the right context to the user. In other words, the Engagement Management functional block is responsible for the front-end, authentication and authorisation of users, and management of the user-interaction journeys including content personalisation and filtering.
Within the Engagement functional block sits the SPA Self-Service portal that is the main GUI for all end-users. This GUI is used by GÉANT NOC to manage the GCS service and the portal layout and functionalities have been designed as per the needs of this team. The portal can only read information from other SPA components to provide the requested information to the user. This information is filtered according to the user roles and permissions as they are defined in the CRM in Party Management. All other actions that affect changes in the system are done via the Orchestration engine, where user actions in the SSP can trigger processes defined in the orchestration. Thus, in essence the SSP is only allowed to call the orchestrator API, while the orchestrator can make changes in the rest of the system. In other words, the SSP does not have any orchestration logic implemented within, allowing for flexible addition of other communication channels.
The access to the portal is only allowed to authenticated users, and for these purposes the portal is integrated with eduGAIN that provides the AAI functionalities. Once the user goes through the eduGAIN login process, the user credentials are checked with the information in the CRM and, if the user is allowed to use the service, then the corresponding information is presented in the SSP.