Document Control Software - Service Oriented Architecture

FileHold document and record lifecycle software is based on the Microsoft .NET 3.0 framework Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) model. This Architecture provides tremendous benefits to our customers, our partners and to FileHold's product development and professional services teams.

The main subsystems of FileHold communicate with each other via web service calls. These web services are available to third parties to provide easy integration with other enterprise solutions and productivity applications. The Web services are implemented in a highly secure way and require full user authentication. Microsoft provides an ideal technology platform to implement web services and to deliver modern Service Oriented Architecture.

Performance and Scalability

The FileHold Paperless Office application is a collection of web services that together provide high performance and scalability. Examples of web services subsystems found in FileHold include: Library Manager, Document Repository, User & Role Manager and the ASP Layer (application server serving web clients).

All of these subsystems communicate via secure and fully authenticated web service calls. The web client layer consisting of web client, native (smart) client and the Microsoft Office client communicate with the other subsystems through the same web services accessing the same resources and performing identical functions. This architecture allows for tremendous performance improvements by providing the ability to deploy web services on different servers. As an example; the ASP Layer can reside on one web server and the Library Manager and Document Repository can reside on another.

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This scalability can be magnified even further by installing selected web services (subsystems) on web farms (server clusters). Using multiple servers to run the ASP Layer provides for almost infinitive scalability in terms of web client users. Using a web farm to deploy the Document Repository allows for scalability in terms of the number of documents. FileHold has been architected, built, stress and load tested for millions of documents and thousand of simultaneous users.

Flexible Deployment Scenario

The FileHold Service Oriented Architecture supports a broad spectrum of deployment scenarios It can be installed on one, two or any number of servers to satisfy the most demanding, high traffic and mission critical applications. Each web service (subsystem) can be installed on a separate server or server farm.

SOA allows for easy adaptation to an existing customer's datacenter deployment scenario. For example it is possible to use an existing instance of SQLServer residing on customer's servers and at the same time install Document Repository on another server that might be used to store sensitive data (files).

Extendibility

The FileHold architecture provides for an elegant and easy to implement extensibility paradigm. This secure web service calls interface is available to our professional services team to provide customization services when needed. A new subsystem, such as a custom rules based document importation and filing engine, can be added easily and inexpensively, using the web service interfaces which are relevant to the task. There is no need to understand the details and complexity of other modules and subsystems.

Easy and Secure Custom Extensions and Third Party Software Integration

It is also easy for our consultant partners and our customer's to extend and/or amend FileHold's functionality; and to integrate FileHold with the existing enterprise productivity applications. The web services API exposes, in a secure way, functionality to create library objects (cabinets, folders or document schemas), associate documents being added with metadata schema and values; and/or manage library object memberships.

Reusability in Complex Deployment Scenarios

FileHold's subsystems can be re-used by other web-service aware applications and provide enterprise or departments wide functionality to eliminate functional redundancies. As an example; our Microsoft's Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) and Authorization Manger (AzMan) based User & Role Management Subsystem could be used as a single sign-on authentication store for other enterprise applications. The Active Directory object synchronization and local (non-AD) user creation capabilities could, in some cases, provide the right solutions to the multifaceted users-to-applications relationship dilemma.

Reusability in Software Development

Service Oriented Architecture raises the benefits of Object Oriented development to another level. By exposing services the web service provider completely shelters users from the details of service requests and processing details.

By adhering to the four tenets of the true Service Oriented Architecture paradigm:

• Boundaries are explicit
• Services are autonomous
• Schemas and contracts (between services) and not classes (code) should be shared
• Service compatibility is based on policy

The FileHold product development team is able to dramatically shorten software development cycle and deliver subsequent releases of FileHold Document Management System in record times.