Verity also offers groupware agents for Microsoft Exchange for managing intranet Web resources and sharing information that supports group goals and objectives. SandPoint Hoover provides personalized information search services for corporate users in a Lotus Notes environment. DSS Agent applications are in use to provide ad hoc analysis and exception reporting in large data warehouses. The user benefits of an agent lie in its task skills. Table 1.1 outlines the benefits of agents in broad functional categories.
Repetitive behavior can be either time based or event based.
A time-based task is something that the user does at a particular time, like visiting a particular Web site every morning at nine o'clock. An event-based task is something that the user does in relation to another task. The repetitive behavior of a single user is particularly suitable for agent-based automation when this repetitive behavior is dissimilar across the general user population. This situation makes it very hard to come up with a design compromise that would suit the whole population. On servers, similar behavior of a group of users can benefit from agent automation.