In the situation where more than one person is logged on to mango and potentially operating the same piece of equipment (say they are both responding to the same event/alarm) the two people need a means to communicate with each other.
It is preferable to use mango to pass the messages back and forth so that they can be logged and displayed to other users that may logon later. A bit like IRC. A record of the response to a given event can be created.
If the conversation takes place in an external IM program then the record of the conversation is lost. Voice conversations may also take place but specific operations, analysis, or conditions that need to be recorded could be entered via the "chat" log or maintenance log.
This is a bit different from User Comments:
[list]User comments are attached to a point whereas the maintenance/chat/operator log I am envisioning would be associated with the entire system or mango instance[/list]
[list]the messages would need to be immediately displayed to all other users logged on[/list]
[list]when a user logs on they should be able to review the log of messages passed back and forth between the other users without having to navigate to the point details.[/list]
The messages could be stored in the user comments table.
Should I create a 'dummy' point to associate my maintenance/chat log messages with and then modify the html pages to suit or does anyone see a better way?
Thanks for your thoughts
C