Overview

The Global Relay Message platform is a secure, scalable, compliant, and fault-tolerant instant messaging system specifically built to address the regulatory requirements of the financial services industry.

• Compliant: Global Relay Message integrates time stamped send & receive receipts with guaranteed and redundant data storage of all messages across multiple nodes in multiple data centers.

  Global Relay Message keeps a complete audit log for every thread in a conversation (an exchange of messages), recording:

  • who saw a message
  • exactly when it was originally sent and received
  • a record of every user that accessed a historical copy of that message thread

• Secure: Global Relay Message clients use HTTPS, SSL over TCP or AES for secure client connections. Global Relay Message supports secure login using a Global Relay account password, Active Directory password authentication or SAML identity providers. All messages are encrypted and stored permanently in the Global Relay system.

• Scalable: Global Relay Message is designed to scale, and is capable of supporting millions of simultaneous users. Every element of Global Relay Message has been designed to ensure and optimize scalability - from the efficient routing of presence messages through to ensuring that Globlal Relay Archive can handle millions of messages per day.

• Fault tolerant: Global Relay Message is built using high performance data store systems, built for data integrity and multiple stored copies on active-active mirrored data centers to guarantee no loss of data. Multiple application instances in a resource pool allow transparent failover without impacting the availability of the overall service.

Architecture

Purpose designed for the financial services community, the Global Relay Message platform is designed to interconnect several million users. It is built with system and data center redundancy for service resiliency and reliability, and is tuned for high performance - it is capable of transacting millions of messages each hour. The Global Relay Message system consists of the following key system components:

• Firewalls and Load Balancers: Provides first layer services security and balances incoming client sessions across front-end servers.
• Front-End Servers: Distributes connection load, manages conversations and disseminates presence updates.
• Cloud Storage: Provides reliable, fault-tolerant, redundant and compliant storage of active conversations.
• Presence Service: Ensures high performance read-optimized presence management service.
• Global Relay Archive: Provides reliable, fault-tolerant, redundant and compliant storage for all conversations.
• Message Hub: Federates users using Global Relay Message, OCS, and Thomson Reuters Messenger.
• Directory: Provides user authentication and authorization services. The directory also contains company and user profile information for all users of the financial services cloud.

Operations Model

Powerful, innovative messaging functionality. Global Relay Message messaging is modeled as conversations between 1 or more participants and can support offline messaging, as well as persistent conversations.

As a compliant messaging system, every recipient must explicitly agree to a new conversation request in Global Relay Message. One user starts a conversation with another user and types their first message to the other user. The second user will then see a conversation request message in their inbox. Upon opening the request, the second user has the option to accept the conversation or to ignore it. If the second user accepts the conversation, the two users can communicate. If the second user ignores the conversation, it is rejected and an appropriate message is passed back to the originating user.

• Multiple Concurrent Login Sessions: Global Relay Message supports multiple simultaneous and synchronized sessions. Users can start conversations on their computer and seamlessly continue the conversation on their mobile devices. Conversations are fully synchronized between the desktop and the mobile device.

• Roster: Users find other users in Global Relay Message by searching the corporate or global directories within Global Relay Message. Users can:

  • view vCards for other users through the directory.
  • save time by copying directory entries or groups into their own roster - thus a user can quickly find someone in their own roster, and initiate a conversation.
  • have their rosters pre-populated by their system administrator, or by Global Relay.

• Presence: Global Relay Message supports:

  • simple presence - providing offline and available status.
  • full presence - supporting additional status states, such as Away, Idle, Busy, and Do Not Disturb.

  Because Global Relay Message supports offline mode messaging and concurrent user sign-in from multiple devices, a single aggregated presence for a user is projected.

• Conversations: A user can have multiple concurrent active conversations between the same participants.

• Threads: Each conversation consists of a linear series of one or more message threads, each of which consists of one or more messages. Message threads are a segment of a conversation, demarcated by participant or subject changes or other criteria. They are written to the archive when a message thread ends. A single message thread is shared amongst the participants present in the conversation during the duration of the message thread.

• Read Receipts: Global Relay Message supports message write verification with geographically diverse storage, end-to-end message reconciliation, read receipt, guaranteed message delivery and fast indexed search. Each message transitions from:

  • Queued (Q) when the message is submitted, to
  • Sent (S) after the message has been submitted to the Global Relay Message service, to
  • Pending (P) after the message is received by the Global Relay Message service, to
  • Deliver (D) after the message has been delivered and received by the receiving client, and
  • Read (R) after the message has been read by the recipient, or
  • Not Delivered (X) if the recipient ignored the conversation request or if the message was sent into a conversation that no longer exists.

• Message Archiving: Global Relay Message uses the Global Relay Archive to permanently record all conversations and any subsequent access to those conversations. Global Relay Archive maintains a personal index for each user. This enables all of the conversations for a user to be rapidly retrieved from the archive.

Developer API

The Global Relay Message API and accompanying SDK enables third party developers to develop plug-ins and extensions by providing programming interfaces directly to the Global Relay Message core platform. Three separate APIs supporting Java, JavaScript, and C# are provided for developers to build messaging systems or extend Global Relay Message platform capabilities.

• Standalone Messaging Applications: Standalone messaging clients can be built using the Global Relay Message core platform. The Java, JavaScript, and C# APIs provide the messaging interface between the application and the Global Relay Message core messaging system.

• Embedded Messaging Applications: Global Relay Message messaging can be integrated into thick-client applications or embedded as thin-client widgets in web applications.

• Notification Services: The Global Relay Message Java and C# APIs provides notification services such as new messages and invitations.

• Bots and Back-end Integration: Bots and extension applications can be developed using the Global Relay Message API to perform a wide range of services, such as pulling structured messages from a conversation, processing them and posting the message back into a conversation or another application such as an Excel spreadsheet.