The ECM Revolution – Service Oriented Architecture

What (SOA) Services Oriented Architecture means to the ECM Marketplace.

Introduction

Today's web environment 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 to automate 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.

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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
Traditional CMS and Portal applications are unfinished, complex and require significant implementation
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 shared into 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 architecture Centralpoint© provides. The
combination of modular tools and built-in support for distributed debugging and re-deployment allows

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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 RSS documents 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.

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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. This allows 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 instantly
across the network. This significantly reduces solution deployment, upgrade and implementation costs
compared 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.

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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 of abstraction 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 and solutions 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 the next
few years. For more information on Oxcyon or Centralpoint©, please visit www.oxcyon.com or call 440-
239-8611

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