Let s look at a few examples of customers leveraging existing technologies to deliver new services.

Transcription

1 MODULE 2: NOVELL WEB APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT Welcome to Module 2 of The Certified Novell Salesperson Course, Novell Web Application Development, enabled by Novell extend technologies. In this module you will learn how Novell helps organizations leverage existing systems to provide new or enhanced services to employees, partners, suppliers and customers by building a Services Oriented environment based on Web Services standards. Business Issues Your customers have a mix of business applications that perform a variety of business functions/processes from accounting to order processing. These applications have accumulated over a period of time and were designed to address a specific business problem. While they were probably state-of-the-art at the time of original purchase or installation, they were not designed to communicate with each other, or take advantage of the Web. Effectively, these applications have been automating their own silos of information, without noticing similar or related requirements in other departments of the organizations. So now the time has come where we need access to that departmental information in a consolidated format that does not disrupt current business operations. Access to this information is critical. Have you ever watched someone make a decision without all of the relevant information necessary to make that decision? Real-time access to consolidated information not only enables better decision making but it can also increase customer service, streamline business processes and enable partner, employee and customer self-service ultimately lowering costs associated with doing business. Market Opportunity Executives have lost patience with technology that doesn t align with the business or fulfill its original promise. However, there is still a heavy mandate to leverage technology to gain competitive advantage. Think about the existing investments many of your customers have in COBOL applications. According to industry estimates, there are over 200 billion lines of COBOL code used in today's business applications, with several billion lines of new application code added annually. These applications are not going away. Your customers are finding innovative ways to take advantage of their IT assets by repurposing transactions and data into services available to new audiences over the Web. Let s look at a few examples of customers leveraging existing technologies to deliver new services. Hartford Hospital is streamlining business processes and cutting costs by optimizing the way data flows throughout their enterprise. Acer EMEA is empowering its sales and marketing executives with a portal that enables them to make business decisions that increase revenue and profits. Transamerica is offering its agents a range of self-service options that improve customer satisfaction and agent loyalty while lowering costs. 2-1

2 Belgium Railroad is enabling travelers and travel agents to purchase and print tickets online through a portal, resulting in increased ticket sales, better customer services and more accurate communication between the travel agent and the railroad. The business services listed above are as diverse as the businesses themselves, yet they have three things in common: 1. They produce tangible business benefits. 2. They were created by teams who did not posses advanced software development skills. 3. They are based on flexible services-oriented architectures, using web services standards. Web services lie at the heart of the next major paradigm shift in software development called Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This has moved past early hype stage and is now being adopted by major global players in every industry. You can see why IDC predicts Web services projects to increase from $453 million in 2002, to $1.2 billion in 2003, to $7.1 billion in What is a Service Oriented Architecture enabled by Web services? So what is a Service Oriented Architecture or SOA? And why are Web services important to SOA adoption? In the simplest terms: a SOA is a software architecture, a way to build software, that is designed in such a way that it can cope with change. This change can be many different things: a company can be subject to different competitive circumstances, an application can have different types of uses, can be accessed by different user devices, can be implemented on top of different backend systems, etc. A SOA enabled by web services allows us to deal with this changing environment with minimal effort, because it is inherently composed of loosely coupled components that can exist with or without each other. Web services standards allow us to reduce the complexity of deploying a SOA by enabling the continued use of existing resources. The best example is the fact that most of your customers have business applications that were never meant to run on the Web. These applications were also not written to work across multiple platforms or across organizational boundaries and were certainly not written to the industry standards that exist today. Service oriented architecture and web services standards allow you to quickly capture these legacy applications so they can easily flow between firewalls and across the Internet. The more technical definition is: Web services standards allow for interoperable application components that you make available to users or other services-oriented applications over your company s intranet or the Internet. So what will Service Oriented Architectures enabled by Web services do for your customers? They can help your customer use the resources they already have to provide new services for customers, partners and employees. Users can access the services using standards-based web services protocols over virtually any kind of network on any kind of device. These standards are composed of four key components which make up a Web service: 2-2

3 Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) enables one Web service to communicate with another Web service using standard Internet protocols HTTP and TCP/IP. Extensible Markup Language (XML) provides a standards-based interface to the underlying application logic of a Web service. Web Services Description Language (WSDL) provides the method for Web services to describe themselves. Universal Description and Discovery Integration (UDDI) provides a registry through which Web services can advertise themselves and find other Web services. What is the Business Value of Service Oriented Architecture enabled by Web services? In a word, the key business value is agility. Service oriented architectures are not tightly connected to a user interface or an application platform. Based on the Web Services standards, they can be plugged into portals, desktop applications or handheld devices with minimal coding. Web services standards are also reusable. As more services become available, new applications can quickly be assembled from these pre-built parts. It is important not to oversimplify this technology. Service Oriented Architectures can be very complex. The skills required are not readily found in most IT organizations today, however most component-oriented developers can make the switch to the new loosely-coupled paradigm fairly easily. This is why your customers must select tools that simplify and accelerate development and deployment of every phase of the project. Your experience and expertise in this area will help your customers achieve an efficient Services Oriented Architecture that can increase their competitive edge and help them quickly adapt to business and market changes. What does Novell s Service-oriented Web Application Development Include? The Novell Service-oriented Web Application Development solution offers a simplified, unified approach to Web services. Together, we can deliver an infrastructure for creating and securely deploying Web services enabled applications. These applications decouple the information and services available in existing applications and use this data in new ways to help lower costs and increase services offered inside and outside corporate boundaries. We can help you meet your customers key business objectives to: Repurpose decades of accumulated data and functionality isolated in existing systems Dynamically deliver relevant information to any user and any device Ensure that the security and integrity of business systems are never compromised Finish projects on time and on budget with existing developer skill sets Novell offers three key technologies to meet these business objectives: integration of systems, interaction with end-user communities, and making these integration and interaction services secure and manageable based on our solid identity management infrastructure. Novell offers a unique advantage by delivering identity based services. We ll discuss integration and interaction in this section. The Secure identity management infrastructure is discussed in module

4 Novell Web Application Development Powered by Novell extend Web application development is powered by an integrated application platform suite called Novell extend. It is a mix of integrating your existing systems, determining how those systems should interact with the people you do business with and creating those services with a set of visual tools that will work across the platforms that exist in your business. The following components are all included in the Novell extend Suite. Integration Services (Novell extend Composer ) Using extend Composer, you can integrate your organization's existing legacy and proprietary applications. Composer enables connections between mainframe, mini and UNIX* environments as well as packaged applications, allowing you to transform the information and services currently locked within these applications into services (optionally including Web Services standards) that streamline process and drive advanced portals. Composer includes the important Business Process Management capabilities to link series of Integration services together into consistent, managed and transparent integration processes. Interaction Services (Novell extend Director Enterprise Edition) Novell extend Director provides a comprehensive visual development environment to help you create state-of-the-art, standards-based Web applications and portals that present end-users with a personalized user interface, on top of the integrated set of services that are delivered by the Composer integration capabilities. Web Application Server (Novell extend Application Server) Novell extend Application Server is a Java* 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE*)-certified application server that provides a complete foundation for building and deploying cross-platform, high-performance J2EE and Web services-based applications. Customer Issue: Integrating Systems with Systems Through the years, business systems have been purchased and deployed to solve departmental problems. These applications may run flawlessly and provide all the scalability and performance needed to do the work they were designed to do. Unfortunately, they were not designed to work with other departmental applications. Batch processes, manual report formatting, data entry and re-keying are all outdated methods of managing and manipulating data that drive up the cost for businesses that want to further optimize the cross-departmental, cross-cutting processes that invariable exist in the organization. Cross-cutting business processes cannot be streamlined unless data can move more fluidly throughout the enterprise. 2-4

5 Integrating Systems with Systems with Novell extend A widely adopted application of Service-oriented architectures is enabling systems to communicate with each other in a standard way, using Web Services standard protocols. Instead of moving information from system to system using batch processes or custom code, the Web services standards enable systems to communicate using XML as an open standard protocol. More importantly, this can be accomplished without disruption to current service, and without re-implementing the entire functional system again in parallel. Novell extend Composer enables you to take business functions that were once tied to a singlepurpose system and transform them into open services that you can assemble into new business applications. System integration is widely known as the most time consuming and unrewarding portion of any project. Most developers tell us that it easily consumes percent of the overall project time. Why spend the majority of your time getting systems to communicate with one another when you could spend that time building additional functionality? With extend Composer, you can cut that time in half. The user interface is so intuitive that mainstream developers can begin comfortably working in Composer within a matter of days. Now, developers do not have to know Java to take advantage of true service-oriented integration techniques. With no prior knowledge of Composer, Hartford Hospital transformed their mainframe-based transactions into Web services in only four weeks. Acer EMEA integrated two additional ERP applications into their order management portal in only two days. Composer makes it easy with a drag-and-drop metaphor to easily create Web services-based integrations. Once you have created these open and integrated applications, they can be deployed to the leading J2EE application servers from BEA, IBM, Novell and Apache. Platform independence is unique to Novell. Only Novell supports deployments to BEA s WebLogic* and IBM s WebSphere*. If you already have an investment in one of these J2EE application server platforms, you can run your Web services created with Novell extend Composer on top of them, and benefit from our productivity toolsets as an integral part of your current development architecture. Partners of ours also benefit from this, because they can use the same development skills time and time again on the different underlying application server infrastructures. To assist with the connection to existing systems, Novell extend Composer Connectors can be purchased. These tested and certified adapters facilitate communication to a wide range of enterprise systems. A very extensive list already exists today, and we are adding many more in the course of How is Composer Used? You may be wondering about the wide range of uses for Novell extend Composer. Many customers have used Novell extend to provide a variety of services, such as: Advanced portal integration, including legacy application to Web, Web self-service, business-toconsumer and portal-to-portal integration. Enterprise application integration, including application-to-application and straight-through processing. 2-5

6 Business-to-business services, including electronic data exchange, trading networks and marketplaces. Let s take a look at an example. An international airfreight carrier operates two mainframes, one in the US and one in Europe that provide business critical logistical and tracking applications. The business requires that as airfreight crosses the Atlantic so does accompanying airbill information. As a consequence, airbills move from one mainframe to the other. For the addressee to obtain shipment status they first call a customer service representative in the local country, who uses a mainframe application to search for the airbill. If the information is found everything is wonderful. However, if no information is found, a lengthy process must be used to discover the status. The customer service representative would have to call the other call center, they would look up the information, then the customer service representative would call the addressee back with the status. Obviously this process is expensive, inefficient and could cause customer dissatisfaction. Novell extend Composer could be used to provide information Web services that aggregate data from both legacy systems to produce data for consumption by portals, most likely one built with Novell extend Director which we will discuss next. The original systems can be queried without modifications, safeguarding previous investments. Customer service representatives and customers can query airbill information without the need to contact the call center, lowering call center volumes. International telephone calls are eliminated, dramatically reducing operational costs. Airbill information can be accessed from anywhere, not just behind the firewall. Web service enablement offers the potential for the service to be offered to new channels, partners and systems. Of course, this is just one example. Visit to see how some customers are using Novell extend Composer. Now let s take a look at presenting this information to those who need to consume it. Customer Issue: Information Interaction Requirements for new Web-based applications are more demanding than ever. Users expect a personalized, secure experience. They expect to access the information they need from the device of their choice. They may prefer to use Microsoft* for reporting and data input, a desktop for office hours, a handheld device while traveling and a browser from home. Developers need to create applications that are flexible enough to satisfy these requirements, yet powerful enough to provide advanced functionality such as workflow, content management and interaction based on business rules. Additionally, developers are caught in a dilemma between high productivity and architectural purity. How can they deploy standards-based applications in a highly productive way? 2-6

7 Interaction with Novell extend Director Once the integration services are created (eg. using extend Composer), many cases require a front end to be developed to bring them all together in a relevant and dynamic way for an end-user community. This isn t limited to portals only, but any type of advanced Web application like internal accounting or manufacturing process visibility. Novell extend Director Enterprise Edition is an advanced portal server that enables IT developers to deliver and maintain standards-based Web applications. Using Director s productive visual environment, developers can rapidly build J2EE-based portal applications that consolidate information from different sources and deliver relevant views to key business users. Director brings standards-based development to the mainstream development community striking the balance between high productivity and architectural integrity. Director goes well beyond a standard portal combined with a productive development environment. Commonly used advanced functions like search, workflow and content management are pre-built components included in extend Director that can dramatically accelerate the development of these advanced interaction services that most customers require as part of their portal. Information must be available on the devices your user community uses. Transcoding in Novell extend Director allows you to make information and functions available on any device, from any location. For example, your field sales representatives can obtain timely, accurate information on a host of different wireless devices including their PDAs or Internet-enabled cell phones. Of course, you can rely on Novell to deliver extend Director applications that are 100% J2EE compliant and can be run on your Web application server of choice. However, just like with extend Composer, we include the Novell extend Web application server with Novell extend Director so your customer may choose to use what they have instead of making an additional purchase. How is extend Director Used? There are many ways that your customers can use Novell extend Director. Remember, everything that you create using Director is deployable to the market-leading J2EE application servers. Create standards-based applications without sacrificing productivity by continuing to use your existing J2EE development tools as a compliment to our WYSIWYG development environment based on Xforms. Organize information in a meaningful way and present information on a variety of devices, including wireless devices. Manage interactions using services that provide personalization, user profiling, workflow, rules, security and wireless support. Let s look at an example. Your organization would like to increase users productivity by creating applications that include automated workflow processes. For example, an application could automatically present to new users a request form for office supplies. After users submit the form, the application could then forward it to a supervisor for approval and finally deliver the approved form to 2-7

8 your organization s purchasing department. An application like this one could dramatically reduce the amount of time users waste waiting for the supplies that they need. In this example, the workflow application would retrieve and store request forms using the extend Director content management subsystems, which work with any type of digital content. Employees Partners B2B Customers Answers to Activity 2 3 C The Novell extend Advantage With extend, Novell is effectively delivering on a promise that should allow our customers to leverage that secure and manageable infrastructure as part of One Net, supporting the various business processes and business applications that they run. Novell extend allows them to develop services around identity, where these services are able to integrate heterogeneous backend systems into the services oriented architecture and also present the users with web-based and personalized access to these services as part of their preferred portal application. Listed below are three key advantages delivered by Novell extend. The most productive in the industry: our toolsets allow customers to create new services in a matter of days, not months. The most secure in the industry: our architecture is fully integrated with Novell s secure and identity-driven architecture. The most open in the industry: Novell supports open standards, runs on any OS, any database, and on the leading J2EE application servers which proves our openness and protects our customers investments. 2-8

9 Activity Your customer has standardized on an IBM Web application server. They are interested in the mainframe integration capabilities that Novell extend brings to the table, but they must continue to use their IBM environment. How should you proceed? A. Tell them they will just have to fight the political battle and replace the IBM WebSphere application servers with Novell extend Web application servers. B. Remind them that Novell extend applications are 100% J2EE compliant and can run on IBM WebSphere servers, protecting their existing investment. C. Tell them to continue to develop within their existing IBM environment. D. Remind them that they can purchase NetWare 6.5 and receive the Novell extend application server as part of that purchase. 2. Which of the following scenarios could be solved more easily with services-oriented integration and interaction technologies built on web services standards? A. Your customer would like to automate order processing and reporting to field personnel B. Your customer would like to link information from disparate systems into one view C. Your customer would like to leverage existing investments but offer new services to existing customers, employees, suppliers and partners D. All of the above E. None of the above 3. Which of the following technologies would best be described as the broadest reaching, easiest to use integration server? A. Novell extend Composer B. Novell extend Director C. Novell extend Integration Server D. Novell extend Application Server 4. Which of the following components is NOT included in the Novell extend suite? A. Novell extend Composer B. Novell extend Director C. Novell extend SAP Connector D. Novell extend Application Server 2-9

10 Real Customers Real Solutions Let s look at how a real Novell customer used Novell extend to help solve some of their pressing business issues, Acer EMEA. Acer is among the world s top ten branded PC vendors and employs marketing and service operations across Asia- Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas, supporting dealers and distributors in over 100 nations. The Problem In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Acer coordinates sales among a dozen national subsidiaries throughout its region, each using different back-office applications and procedures to manage operations. Because business practices vary by country, the differing systems and reporting processes were of little help to Acer s EMEA management team in efficiently forecasting and reviewing the business of the region as a whole. Acer EMEA wanted to unify its business operations within a single system, but at the same time preserve familiar back-office applications to ease the transition for users. The new system needed to provide management with comprehensive and timely information to make better business decisions. The Solution Novell extend Acer selected Novell based on previous positive experiences with Novell and because the productivity offered by the Novell extend visual development environment would help the company meet its short time-to-market objectives. Using Novell extend, the company could rapidly repurpose existing backoffice systems, unify its operations and improve customer service. Using Novell extend, Acer EMEA created a Web services-based management system that unified its business operations and has improved overall operating efficiency. With access to centralized data across the region, Acer EMEA can be more responsive to both customers and suppliers and executives can make more informed decisions based on timely business metrics from each country. Acer has reduced operating costs by eliminating manual errors and by standardizing communication with its suppliers, which shortens supplier lead time and increases the flexibility to work with suppliers that can provide the best service and price. As business needs change, Acer EMEA can easily extend the Order Management System and rapidly integrate other systems. With Novell s help, we went from conceptual design to full deployment, beating our aggressive schedule times in the process. Now our Web services application can take us in any of several different directions. Novell extend has more than met our current technology challenges, and has also positioned us to move quickly and flexibly in the future. Howard Cheung, CIO, Acer EMEA Answers to Activity 2-1: 1. B 2. D 3. A 4. C 2-10