The ECM Revolution – Service Oriented Architecture

What (SOA) Services Oriented Architecturemeans to the ECM Marketplace.

Introduction
Today's webenvironment is rapidly changing. Business dynamics and technological innovations have left organizations with a disparate mix of operating systems, applications and databases, which comprise the content management or enterprise environment. This makes it difficult, time-consuming and costly for IT departments to quickly deliver new web applications that are scalable and manageable long term.

Enterprises have traditionally implemented separate solutions for operating Intranets, Extranets, packaged applications, business-to-business (B2B) interactions, public facing websites, collaboration and general-purpose distributed web computing. Moreover, IT professionals also need to plan for unforeseen and changing dynamics created by mergers and acquisitions, new partnerships, expansion, and new customer requirements.

This creates a serious bottleneck in the ability to manage, change, and modify enterprise processes to dynamically match changes in requirements.The key to success in the networked economy is the ability to create and modify processes toautomate value chains in concert with changing requirements. Faster change management will help enterprises integrate their processes over the Internet so can achieve greater efficiency, generate more revenue, and enter new markets.

Centralpoint© represents an entirely different ECM technology, built on a service-oriented architecture (SOA).Centralpoint© is based on the notion of services, which are high-level software components that govern lower tier, re-usable modular components across multiple web initiatives within a network or multiple networks. Implementation of SOA requires tools as well as the infrastructure software which governs them…which we collectively refer to as Centralpoint©SOA.

Centralpoint© includes both infrastructure and n-tiered re-usable web structures inclusive of modular software functionality that modern enterprises require to build and operate within SOA including service-oriented:

  • Database structures
    Modules (Modular Tools, functions and features)
  • Management Tools
  • Integration
  • Deployment Wizards
  • Data Warehousing

Users compose solutions by connecting multiple modules together from the infrastructure across the network to run for each individual solution. Centralpoint© lets business analysts create, deploy, manage, and change processes spanning multiple enterprise applications, departments, and partners.

Centralpoint© address the needs of process management at the application, human-interaction, and

implementation levels. Centralpoint©addresses these needs within and across enterprises and across multiple domains,collaboration, and even network management each area is traditionally served by distinct solutions.

Benefits of Centralpoint© SOA
Centralpoint© focuses on internal and cross-enterprise processes, helping organizations streamline

operations, reduce costs, and increase responsiveness. Specifically, Centralpoint© provides general purpose, service-based distributed computing capabilities that deliver:

  • Faster response rate to changing business requirements
  • Re-usability for new functions based on new responses
  • Operational efficiencies
  • Faster, less expensive application integration
  • Easier application development and deployment

Responsiveness

Existing enterprise solutions are inadequate in their ability to quickly change processes in response to changing business dynamics. The effort typically requires additional manual code development and results in a system or systems that are difficult to maintain and extend. Centralpoint© strengthens the enterprise by enabling rapid changes to existing processes by dynamically allowing the inclusion of additional services or modification of existing services. Centralpoint© also includes support for modular functionality, database design and code to be altered, allowing modified processes to be redeployed instantly….completely eliminating the disparate development version control which plagues ECM today.

Efficiency

Most packaged CMS and Portal enterprise applications perform well in streamlining processes related to standard or highly specific tasks. However, the performance rapidly deteriorates while automating and streamlining customized processes that encompass multiple enterprise applications. The process is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to implement and maintain. Inevitably the versions of each site within the multiple enterprises will grow apart from one another, compounding the dilemma over time.

Centralpoint©’s infrastructure addresses this issue by allowing the definition of any configuration of modular options within any server or network topology, spanning multiple enterprise boundaries. This is accomplished via peer-to-peer web based infrastructure allowing efficient re-usability and data exchanges for easy implementation, while granting autonomy to each subordinate enterprise to enforce its own policies. This allows Centralpoint© to increase operational efficiency across the entire value chain.

Application Integration

TraditionalCMS and Portal applications are unfinished, complex and require significantimplementation effort, often including extensive manual coding for deployment purposes. Centralpoint© provides out of the box, a complete SOA lifecycle framework. This framework, entitled the Master Management Console acts as parent to unlimited sites, including galleries comprising hundreds of commonly needed tools which may be required across the network. This SOA framework dramatically reduces the overall costs of application integration and deployment by automating these time consuming processes. It also allows extension of these tools by its clients across business boundaries and industries, considerate of local customization and development of the modules needed.

Application Development & Deployment

In any traditional CMS/Enterprise application translating requirements into working distributed systems is both time-consuming and difficult, requiring several stages of manual development and deployment. This complex, error-prone task can be effectively streamlined using a higher-level, component-based Centralpoint©. Centralpoint©incorporates market-ready tools that let processes that are developed, to be replicated and sharedinto high-level services, which are easier to develop, manipulate, and debug at the core. These components are easily distributed without the user or developer having to track complex middleware concepts. Further, the individual web initiatives can run on individual machines or databases across the network by virtue of the built-in inheritance architectureCentralpoint© provides. The combination of modular tools and built-in support for distributed debugging and re-deployment allows Centralpoint© to dramatically reduce the time taken to implement and deliver working processes.

Service Oriented Architecture(SOA) Requirements

As organizations realize the importance of SOA, so will the vendors quick to utilize the terminology as a buzzword and sales tool. SOA requirements will quickly follow. Centralpoint© is a general-purpose CMS/Portal infrastructure platform that lets developers and business analysts create, deploy, manage, and change processes within and across the enterprise. Centralpoint©has unique SOA prerequisites at both the infrastructure and site levels that are not typically provided by any single current technology or platform. These include:

  • Distributed, event-enabled architecture
  • Flexibility via distributed and modular-enabled processes
  • Enterprise standards support
  • Roll Back Control/ Audit Trail
  • Data Import and Export at every level
    Replication and inheritance from the infrastructure moving forward
    Synchronization tools allowing for re-deployment
  • Wizard based deployment of both Enterprises and Sites
  • Garbage Collection, Media Cleaning
  • Data Correction

By addressing these requirements, Centralpoint© lets users quickly respond to changes and integrate operations efficiently, regardless of industry or specific web initiatives.

Flexibility via Synchronization

Centralpoint© makes it simple to deploy, manage, and change participating processes. This implies a modular architecture, in which applications are composed of modules and module suites which may be activated and deactivated per web initiative. Such an architecture enables a rapid deployment model, decreasing the lead times required for solution implementation from months to minutes. This architecture supports on-the-fly modifications of processes, letting analysts change and instantly re-deployment processes to meet rapidly changing requirements. Rollback control allows for the definition of these re-deployed functions to be re-visited (again re-deployed) if necessary to adjust to the business process requirements.

Enterprise Standards Support

Support for data exchange, warehousing, and existing enterprise standards becomes essential in Centralpoint©. Since content needs to be exchanged between partners, XML and RSSdocuments are the desired format. Further, since most businesses want to leverage existing infrastructures, Centralpoint© needs to easily support multiple standards.

Fault Tolerance, Reliability, & Scalability

Centralpoint© offers an extremely high degree of reliability. The platform supports a broad range of processes that span an increasing number of applications, corporations, and partners. To eliminate single points of failure and to maximize performance, a fully distributed architecture becomes essential. Centralpoint© can be utilized in a load balanced environment, and even across multiple networks to meet the highest scalability.

Security in a Distributed Environment

Centralpoint© needs to be fully distributed for maximum performance and scalability. In such a distributed computing environment, it becomes necessary to restrict the scope of interactions that partners can conduct with the corporate IT infrastructure. It becomes necessary to allow customization for the interactions of each partner by providing different security roles on a per-site, per-user and per-module basis.

This requires a security model that incorporates the same modularity that the technology itself utilizes, such as Centralpoint©’s infrastructure itself. This security model needs to be based on existing standards and tools and should support certificate authentication at both the user and modular level.
Visual Process Composition

Centralpoint© provides a single dashboard with visibility into an organization's entire distributed computing environment. The platform incorporates visual implementation-process-composition tools, together with infrastructure-level support to instantly deploy the modeled implementation-level processes across a distributed enterprise network. These tools directly take advantage of higher-level modules and functions at the site level. They also provide both a visual display of site and portal constructs and map directly (and naturally) to deployable processes.
A critical problem in deploying distributed systems is monitoring and debugging concurrently running processes. Centralpoint© provide native and organic support for tracing, logging, and monitoring any process or service across the distributed environment, that is not available in a traditional CMS or Portal environment.

Process Changes

Another challenge is responding to changing requirements. Centralpoint© provides support for incremental on-the-fly modification of the flows that implement processes. This is among the most critical features of Centralpoint© since it lets analysts visually change and instantly redeploy processes to address dynamic requirements. Such changes are implemented within Centralpoint© by abstracting all concepts relating to lower-level middleware at the tools and applications levels.

Users simply specify that a module be added or replaced by another running module; Centralpoint©dynamically activates that modular component to the new enterprise or site by setting up new underlying

middleware constructs (such as topics and queues, for example) on-the-fly. This allows the

implementation to be changed without stopping the current process in much the same way as

hardware is upgraded on a mainframe system without interruption of operations.

Replication Tools

Replication tools enable composition of distributed modules from one site to another, each of which typically runs in a separate process.Modules may be replicated, changed or created with easy to use wizards and tools eliminating development. Thisallows service-oriented tools within Centralpoint© to compose flexible, easy-to-modify systems.

Easy Process Deployment & Changes

Service-oriented applications deployed in Centralpoint© are composed of modular components ideally suited for easy change and replacement. The modular architecture of Centralpoint©supports the synchronization and re-usability of modules, allowing changed modules and code to be deployed instantlyacross the network. This significantly reduces solution deployment, upgrade and implementation costscompared with traditional solutions. Moreover, it allows for retroactive change to take place whenever the process is improved, empowering re-deployment in a near real time environment.

Conclusions

Centralpoint© SOA introduces distributed web development for the very first time, and effect the ECM market now and in the future. Centralpoint© provides a layer ofabstraction over all web initiatives, allowing distributed solutions to be built and redeployed nearly immediately into composite of multiple web based Portals, Sites and applications over a network, and across ‘multiple’ networks.

Successfully deploying SOA requires software that provides modular and service-oriented management, integration, deployment tools, re-deployment tools and processes. While these segments are currently served by individual packages andsolutions in the market, they are only available collectively within Centralpoint©. Centralpoint© includes all the distributed web development functionality an organization needs to develop, deploy,redeploy, and manage….and will dominate enterprise computing over thenext few years. For more information on Oxcyon or Centralpoint©, please visit or call 440-239-8611

ECM Revolution-SOA