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Is your IT budget under attack? Tired of complex, million-dollar content and document projects that take months, even years, to roll-out?
The Content Application Foundation takes years of research and development, along with experience in the field with enterprise customers around the world, and offers it pre-packaged, out-of-the-box to the IT organization. A unique blend of openness, power, and customizability, it affords all of the capability, but without the headache and cost of traditional approaches.
Content Application Foundation
InStranet's Content Application Foundation (CAF) infrastructure blends common
metadata framework with XML capabilities, providing an
easy way to build customer specific content solutions.Within
the metadata layer, the developer sets content and user dimensions
which automatically trigger the tracking and monitoring features.
Security is achieved using the dimensions to filter all interactions
between users and documents.
Through the XML engine, the common features of content publishing,
workflow, syndication and customization are accessed. In addition,
InStranet provides a powerful set of tools, called Application
Exchange, which enables straightforward integration
between InStranet and other enterprise applications.
Application Integration
InStranet can exchange content or metadata with legacy applications
through Application Exchange. Application Exchange (AppEx)
is InStranet’s ETL (extract, transform and load) integration
framework into which any number of out of-the-box or custom
components can be inserted to provide seamless connectivity
to virtually any existing application.
With Application Exchange, InStranet can share users, dimensions
and documents with existing enterprise applications, such
as Business Intelligence (BI) or Customer Resource Management
(CRM).
Configuring Application Exchange consists of three steps:
| 1) |
Configuring the Extractor (for outgoing content) or
Loader (for incoming content) to interact directly with
InStranet repository. |
| 2) |
Selecting any number of out-of-the-box or custom Content
Transformers as needed to change the format of the content
(e.g. from a Java object to XML, from one XML DTD to another,
to change XML to XSL or flat-file format, etc.). |
| 3) |
Choosing the appropriate Connector for exchanging the
data with the legacy application (i.e. HTTP, sockets,
filesystem-based, etc.). |
Application Exchange is 100% Java, and the out-of-the-box
Java classes can be customized and extended to support additional
types of content transformation, such as content encryption
or connectivity to another platform using a custom protocol.
Application Exchange also provides a syndication capability, enabling
an instance of InStranet to share content with other installations.
For example, a secure internal InStranet server can share
a subset of its content with an extranet server in a firewall-protected
DMZ. This enables an enterprise to keep its critical content
totally secure, yet at the same time, share a subset of the
content with trusted partners and customers.
The InStranet File System Agent (FSA), a component of the
Application Exchange, enables the automatic upload of content
from a file system or static Web site. FSA can be configured
to scan a given location in a file system for new or updated
content, either periodically or on demand, and upload and
store that content in the repository with pre-defined navigationand
security parameters.
SDK Customization
The InStranet SDK provides transparent access to all the application’s
Java objects, enabling developers to extend the application’s
core functionality with their own Java classes. With this
open access, developers can manipulate any object in the InStranet
repository, including dimensions, documents, users, workflow
and document definitions, as well as the associations between
them.
Customization of the end-user experience is equally straightforward,
with a complete set of JavaBeans and custom HTML tags that
make even the most complex Webpage a relatively simple task.
InStranet leverages the power of XML throughout its application architecture.
All workflow and document definitions are created using XML,
and the tagging of documents and users with dimension items
is accomplished using XML. The InStranet Application Exchange
is based entirely on industry standards such as XML, XSL,
HTTP and sockets.
Among other standards, InStranet supports:
- JavaBeans and Java Server Pages (JSP) 1.1
- Java Servlets 2.2
- JAXP 1.1
As with the traditional Content Management platforms, InStranet
separates the content from the presentation. When a document
is published, the Web content is stored in its native format,
which could include MS Office files, images, text, audio/video
o rHTML. Before being presented to the end user, the content
is re-assembled using any number of customized "renderers"constructed
using the InStranet SDK.
Since the InStranet repository and SDK provide access to individual
document fields, developers can construct a range of renderers
to meet a wide variety of requirements. For example, an "overview"
renderer could be created that contains only the title, a
short description, and an associated image, along with a link
to view the full document. Or, different renderers could be
used to display content to different user groups, depending
on their preferred look-and-feel or native language.
Security and Segmentation
InStranet’s multi-dimensional Web engine also simplifies
the administration of site security and user security profiles.
When managing users, an administrator will assign a user to
one or more "communities" that are defined using
the dimensions. These communities correspond to the level
of access that the user should have. For example, the user
may be an internal employee belonging to the marketing department
of the eastern region, or a user may be an external user belonging
to the technical team of partner A. Or, if necessary, the
user can belong to multiple user communities.
These
same dimensional concepts are used when publishing documents,
enabling a publisher to target a document to one or more specific
segments or communities of users without requiring assistance
from administrators. For example, a document could be published
for any marketing employee in the western region, as well
as any salesperson from partner A. Since the dimensions are
the common metadata that drive the security, they provide
an intuitive way to segment communities of users, such as
sales channels or business partners, and then target those
user communities when publishing documents. The dimensions
serve as the common link between users and documents, and
all access to documents is filtered through these dimensions,
ensuring that the security is airtight.
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