Actuate Content Services Process Designer

Transcription

1 Actuate Content Services Process Designer Process Designer Customer Communications Management solutions reduce the costs associated with traditional printing while facilitating better operational performance through improved access to information. Organizations look to Actuate s Customer Communications Management solutions to aid them in providing their lines of business and ultimately their customers with data and documents, presented in the format that is most relevant to them and delivered in a way that is suitable for the channel they prefer. Actuate Content Services Process Designer is a unique and powerful, wizard-driven graphical user interface with intuitive drag-anddrop functionality that allows developers to easily create, configure, deploy and monitor Actuate Content Services. Process Designer provides developers with access to content stored in archives, documents and structured data and is used to create rich customer facing applications. Developers can implement defined process flows to control the flow of information linking various components and processes together, including document transformation and data translation projects. They can also perform a myriad of business logic functions on content flowing through Content Services Process Manager. Creating Customer Communications Management Solutions Content Services Process Manager is for organizations seeking to control the flow of content within their lines of business and extend information beyond the borders of the enterprise to provide their customers with relevant information on a channel most convenient for them. Process Designer helps organizations easily create the business processes required to provide documents and real-time data while monitoring the health and status of the entire platform. In the past, other technologies have been available to perform Business Process Management (BPM), document transformation and data translation, each requiring a separate user interface or the manual editing of configuration files that had to be integrated with custom programming. These disparate systems caused projects to be delayed, over budget or even worse - fail due to the application complexity and training requirements. Consequently, IT and internal application development departments continued to be inundated with requests for new process flows and custom connectors to existing applications which resulted in huge backlogs and less time for work on strategic initiatives. Process Designer allows business and data analysts to implement the business logic they need to provide their businesses with a robust and scalable application delivered on top of Actuate Content Services. Key Features Process Designer is built on Java, meaning it can be used on any headed operating system supporting a Java VM version 1.6 or higher. This can include Windows and Linux environments. The easy and intuitive drag-and-drop environment enables users, with varying skill levels from different areas of the business, to define, test and deploy projects unique to their business role. Collaborating with other areas of the business is easy from within one development environment. Features of Process Designer include: Process Flow Definitions Process Designer includes a full-featured Process Flow designer that allows process flows to be easily constructed by dragging processes or components onto the pallet and connecting them together. Developers can control the flow of content into the system as well as make logical decisions based on the content that is being processed.

2 Initiate a process flow from virtually anywhere using events to monitor for file drops, ftp drops, messages, message queues, socket connections, web services and others. Drag and drop components onto the palette to process the data as they want without having to make changes to existing processes. Easily handle errors at a process or process flow level. Visually debug process flows. Create simple to complex process flows through an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. Document Transformation Configuration Process Designer also features drag-and-drop printstream transformation project configuration. Simply drag one of the document format parsers, the various project flow components and a document format generator onto the project flow window and configure them all through the built-in wizards. Mine content directly from the page with Field Technology. Define static and floating fields to ensure data can be captured wherever it exists on the page. Redact content, insert new content or images and move them around on the page. Define reading order and alternate text on images to create PDF documents that are accessible for the visually impaired using assistive technology. Use the fields extracted with Field Technology to write metadata to index files for loading into Content Management Systems or archives. Logically burst or split multi-document printstreams into individual documents as required. Combine documents from multiple sources for manipulation and transformation. Reduce file sizes by ensuring common resources are used once and only once. Visually define text and image objects on the page with Field Technology. 2

3 Improve document appearance by changing fonts. Structured Data Translation and Mapping Process Designer s structured data translation capabilities help organizations with their ETL and application integration projects. Through the convenient drag-and-drop-interface, users can simply drag source data elements to the target data element and implement a variety of out-of-the box functions with the function editor. Transform and translate data between many formats including: XML, CSV, EDI, COBOL, databases, text formats and more. Skip scripting; the drag-and-drop interface means it s not required for mapping elements or manipulating data. Manipulate constructs as you see fit, from aggregating and sorting to filtering and restructuring. Manipulate data using over 100 built-in functions including database lookups, date and string manipulation, mathematical functions and grouping functions. Generate many of the popular formats in use today making integration with trading partners and systems easier. Translate and map structured data from multiple sources and formats and apply over 100 out-of-the-box functions. Components and Processes Process Designer includes over 40 out-of-the box, configurable components that perform content, time and variable-based routing, content manipulation, compression/decompression, file splitting/merging, command line application execution and archive and ECM system loading/retrieving, to name a few. Develop custom components easily with the Process Designer Custom Component Wizard. Create events, processes and executable components for use within Process Manager. Collaboration Process Designer makes it easy to collaborate with team members on projects using the Configuration Repository. Developers and business analysts can work on various aspects of complex projects and check them into the configuration repository for use by others within their business processes. Collaborate with team members through the Configuration Repository. Provide point-release versioning of all files within the Process Manager ecosystem. Schedule solution or project deployment. Deploy changes to solutions within the entire cluster with a single action. Transition between development, quality assurance, user acceptance testing and production easily, without the need for custom scripting or costly downtime. Export solutions and projects to a file system to easily conform to change management policies. 3

4 System and Job-Level Monitoring Monitoring the health of Content Services instances either in a stand-alone or clustered configuration is easy when connecting Process Designer to one of the instances. Once connected, you can view all key metrics such as average processing time, number of failed processes, the process flow utilization rate and more. The data behind these graphs and charts can also be easily exported to CSV format for instant analysis in spreadsheet applications. View how the server is running using the dashboard. Remotely view server log files. Start and stop services. Monitor transactions throughout the day. Determine the processing time of jobs across the cluster and identify bottlenecks for past and current jobs. Monitor Process Manager memory usage across servers. Export job data to CSV format. Schedule jobs to run at certain times to meet SLA requirements. Collaborate on multi-faceted projects by checking in and checking out project files and components within solutions in the Configuration Repository. Then, promote the solutions from development to UAT to production. All relevant job and server health can be monitored through the Process Designer Dashboard, providing real-time views of Process Manager implementations. 4

5 Key Benefits Improves productivity by eliminating custom code and the time it takes to learn products and parameters required for simple and complex projects Manages all facets of building a process flow from receiving the files and routing them to transforming them. Easily integrates with back-end processes through a single user interface, eliminating the need for custom scripting, configuration file editing and the integration of multiple tools or applications. Reduces training and knowledge transfer time with a single graphical user interface across all areas of business processing. Allows developers to create printstream transformation projects without the need for knowing the constructs behind the printstream Simplifies the process of extracting or mining content from the printed page Allows developers to create data mining rules and immediately see the results through a WYSIWYG interface instead of manually editing configuration files. Provides real-time feedback of mined content without the need to run the project and look at the generated results. Enables easy setup and configuration of new document transformation projects through intuitive wizards without deep knowledge of the printstream format Reduces the time required to transform and translate data with a drag-and-drop environment Ingests data in virtually any format. Allows developers to change the constructs, from aggregating and sorting to filtering and restructuring. Manipulates the data using over 100 built-in functions including database lookups, date and string manipulation, mathematical functions and grouping functions. Generates many of the popular formats in use today for integration with trading partners and systems. Simplifies the project lifecycle management process Allows collaboration with co-workers in other business units without the use of third-party tools. Provides versioned project files and resources, ensuring an audit trail is kept for all changes. Promotes solutions through development, UAT and production without the need to bundle, compress and move individual files from server to server. Features an easy-to-use interface Monitors virtually every facet of local and remote instances of Content Services. Ensures seamless operation in lights-out environments. Eliminates the need to scrape log files from multiple servers or nodes in a cluster while providing easy views of system health through the dashboard visualizations. Allows system administrators to remotely view log files and perform job analysis from within Process Designer. Increases ROI Allows developers to quickly implement new projects and functionality and easily make changes to adapt to changing business requirements. 5

6 System Requirements: Windows (32-bit and 64-bit) or Linux (32-bit and 64-bit) JRE 1.6 or higher Single CPU 1.5GHz 1GB of RAM 2GB of free hard drive space ccminfo@actuate.com UK Tel: +44 (0) Singapore Tel: Germany Tel: +49 (0) Australia Tel: +61 (2)