Abstract: A directed dialogue portal system management scheme is disclosed, providing a manager application layer over portal system managed applications. The manager application layer may include a global grammar (e.g., the grammar of each managed application) and each managed application may inherit behaviors of the manager application. Responses to prompts received by a first managed application that are unrecognized or are directed to a second managed application are sent to the manager application. The manager application sends the response to the second application. The scheme is transparent to the user and, from the user's perspective, a user is able to directly access any application or services in a directed dialogue portal system from other locations in the system.

Abstract: A method for testing a server. A component (2) captures a session consisting of requests of and responses from a server (3). The captured session is stored as script files (4, 5). A GUI component (6) facilitates the identification of variable data (30) within the script files. Variable data is data which may vary from session to session. The identification process generates a database (14) with field headers (18) corresponding to the types of data identified (15). A component populates database (13). A driver component (9) uses the script files (11, 12) and the database (13) to test the server (3) by running multiple threads (10) each directing their own session with the server. Where data within the script files has been identified as variable data (13) the thread may substitute data from the database (13). A server testing apparatus and software for implementing the method is also disclosed.