websphere architecture

This image shows the high-level architectural components of WebSphere Application Server - Express for iSeries.

 The architecture of WebSphere Application Server - Express consists of these software components:

WebSphere subsystem

 The WebSphere Application Server - Express subsystem, QASE5, contains the jobs that pertain to WebSphere Application Server - Express. In addition to the jobs running in the QASE5 subsystem, your applications may also use jobs running in other subsystems.

 Application server 

 The application server provides the runtime environment for server-side Java components (such as servlets and JavaServer Pages). An application server contains the following architectural components:

o   Web container 

The Web container runs within the application server and handles requests for servlets, JavaServer Pages files, and the Web applications that contain them.

o   Name server 

The Java Naming and Directory Interface, or JNDI, is used to provide access to Java components within a distributed computing environment. The WebSphere Application Server - Express name server provides the implementation of the JNDI service. You can bind WebSphere Application Server - Express resources to JNDI names, which allows applications to access resources such as data sources and mail providers.

o   Security server 

The WebSphere Application Server - Express security server provides security infrastructure and mechanisms to protect sensitive application resources and administrative resources and to address enterprise end-to-end security requirements on authentication, on resource access control, on data integrity, confidentiality, and privacy, and on secure interoperability.

HTTP server 

The HTTP server receives requests for server-side components (such as servlets and JavaServer Pages) and passes the requests to WebSphere Application Server - Express through an interface called the WebSphere plug-in. WebSphere Application Server - Express supports these HTTP servers:

• IBM HTTP Server for iSeries (powered by Apache)
• Lotus Domino HTTP Server

WebSphere plug-in 

WebSphere Web server plug-ins enable the Web server to communicate requests for dynamic content, such as servlets, to the application server. WebSphere Application Server - Express ships two plug-ins; one for IBM HTTP Server for iSeries (powered by Apache) and one for Lotus Domino HTTP Server. The plug-ins use a configuration file to determine whether a request should be handled by the Web server or the application server. For example, the plug-in forwards servlet requests to the application server. If you are using the HTTP server to serve HTML files, then the plug-in forwards HTML requests to the HTTP server.

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Business Process Management Life Cycle

Traditionally, automation of business processes using workflow has implemented the automated process and then finished. BPM takes this to the next level BPM is about continuous business process improvement.

As well as automating the process, we are capturing the process in a structured way, the monitoring and optimising the process. The process repeats continuously for the life of the process.

This introduces a culture of continual process improvement into the organisation in a structured but easy to use way.

The steps in a BPM Life Cycle are:

Ø  Design

Ø  Implement

Ø  Execute

Ø  Monitor

Ø  Optimise

Functions are designed around the strategic vision and goals of an organization. Each function is attached with a list of processes. Each functional head in an organization is responsible for certain sets of processes made up of tasks which are to be executed and reported as planned. Multiple processes are aggregated to function accomplishments and multiple functions are aggregated to achieve organizational goals.

Design

Process Design encompasses both the identification of existing processes and the design of "to-be" processes. Areas of focus include representation of the process flow, the factors within it, alerts & notifications, escalations, Standard Operating Procedures, Service Level Agreements, and task hand-over mechanisms.

Good design reduces the number of problems over the lifetime of the process. Whether or not existing processes are considered, the aim of this step is to ensure that a correct and efficient theoretical design is prepared.

The proposed improvement could be in human-to-human, human-to-system, and system-to-system workflows, and might target regulatory, market, or competitive challenges faced by the businesses.

The existing process and the design of new process for various applications will have to synchronise as such will not effect the business in major outage. The business as usual is the standard to be attained when design of process for multiple systems is considered.

Modeling

Modeling takes the theoretical design and introduces combinations of variables (e.g., changes in rent or materials costs, which determine how the process might operate under different circumstances).

It also involves running "what-if analysis" on the processes: "What if I have 75% of resources to do the same task?" "What if I want to do the same job for 80% of the current cost?".

Execution

One of the ways to automate processes is to develop or purchase an application that executes the required steps of the process; however, in practice, these applications rarely execute all the steps of the process accurately or completely. Another approach is to use a combination of software and human intervention; however this approach is more complex, making the documentation process difficult.

As a response to these problems, software has been developed that enables the full business process (as developed in the process design activity) to be defined in a computer language which can be directly executed by the computer. The system will either use services in connected applications to perform business operations (e.g. calculating a repayment plan for a loan) or, when a step is too complex to automate, will ask for human input. Compared to either of the previous approaches, directly executing a process definition can be more straightforward and therefore easier to improve. However, automating a process definition requires flexible and comprehensive infrastructure, which typically rules out implementing these systems in a legacy IT environment.

Business rules have been used by systems to provide definitions for governing behaviour, and a business rule engine can be used to drive process execution and resolution.

Monitoring

Monitoring encompasses the tracking of individual processes, so that information on their state can be easily seen, and statistics on the performance of one or more processes can be provided. An example of the tracking is being able to determine the state of a customer order (e.g. order arrived, awaiting delivery, invoice paid) so that problems in its operation can be identified and corrected.

In addition, this information can be used to work with customers and suppliers to improve their connected processes. Examples of the statistics are the generation of measures on how quickly a customer order is processed or how many orders were processed in the last month. These measures tend to fit into three categories: cycle time, defect rate and productivity.

The degree of monitoring depends on what information the business wants to evaluate and analyze and how business wants it to be monitored, in real-time, near real-time or ad hoc. Here,business activity monitoring (BAM) extends and expands the monitoring tools generally provided by BPMS.

Process mining is a collection of methods and tools related to process monitoring. The aim of process mining is to analyze event logs extracted through process monitoring and to compare them with an a priori process model. Process mining allows process analysts to detect discrepancies between the actual process execution and the a priori model as well as to analyze bottlenecks.

Optimization

Process optimization includes retrieving process performance information from modeling or monitoring phase; identifying the potential or actual bottlenecks and the potential opportunities for cost savings or other improvements; and then, applying those enhancements in the design of the process. Overall, this creates greater business value.

Re-engineering

When the process becomes too noisy and optimization is not fetching the desired output, it is recommended to re-engineer the entire process cycle. BPR has become an integral part of organizations to achieve efficiency and productivity at work.

Certification

Currently the certification is being offered by Global Association for Quality Management (GAQM) the Syllabus and Certificate is recognized, approved and managed by the International Accreditation Organization (IAO).

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WebSphere Message Broker introduction

             

WebSphere Message Broker belongs to a family of business integration products that is available from IBM.

Business integration is the coordination and cooperation of all your business processes and applications. It involves bringing together the data and process intelligence in your enterprise, and harnessing these resources so that your applications and your users can achieve their business goals.

Business integration means that:

·         You can connect customers, suppliers, partners, and service providers, with continuing security and control, to enable newly built and re-engineered applications for more effective business processes (for example, Supply Chain Management)

·         You can make mergers and acquisitions a success by integrating dissimilar IT infrastructures from more than one company so that they can work together as a single entity.

·         You can react more quickly to market trends and opportunities because your IT systems are flexible and dependable, and no longer constraining.

·         You can overcome the barriers of diverse computer systems, geographic boundaries, time differences, language and format differences, and different methods of working.

WebSphere MQ messaging provides a secure and far-reaching communications infrastructure that you can expand with WebSphere Message Broker to apply intelligence to your business data as it travels through your network.

Transports

The main components of WebSphere Message Broker (the broker, the Configuration Manager, the User Name Server, and the Message Broker Toolkit) communicate by using the WebSphere MQ Enterprise Transportcommunications protocol.

Your business applications, which you can run on more than 30 industry platforms including hardware and software from IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems, Inc., can connect to the broker by using one of the supported protocols; for example, WebSphere MQ queues and connections, Web services, or WebSphere Adapters.

The benefit of using WebSphere MQ protocols (WebSphere MQ Enterprise Transport or WebSphere MQ Mobile Transport) is that they provide assured, once-only delivery of messages between the components.

WebSphere MQ protocols provide rich support for applications:

·         The Message Queue Interface (MQI) and Application Messaging Interface (AMI) are supported in several programming languages.

·         The point-to-point (including request/reply and client/server) and publish/subscribe application communication models are supported.

·         The complexities of communications programming are handled by the messaging services and are therefore removed from the application logic.

·         The applications can access other systems and interfaces through adapters and gateways to products such as Lotus® Domino®, Microsoft Exchange/Outlook, SAP/R3, and CICS® and IMS/ESA® products.

WebSphere Message Broker

WebSphere Message Broker provides a powerful broker solution driven by business rules. Messages are formed, routed, and transformed according to the rules that you define by using the workbench, a graphical user interface (GUI) that is supported by the Message Broker Toolkit.

Diverse applications can exchange information in dissimilar forms, with brokers handling the processing required for the information to arrive in the right place in the correct format, according to the rules that you have defined. The applications do not need to know anything except their own conventions and requirements.

Applications also have much greater flexibility in selecting which messages they want to receive, because they can specify a topic filter, or a content-based filter, or both, to control the messages that are made available to them.

WebSphere Message Broker provides a framework that supports supplied, basic, functions along with user-defined enhancements, to enable rapid construction and modification of business processing rules that are applied to messages in the system.

WebSphere Message Broker is complemented by various other IBM products such as WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) and WebSphere Transformation Extender (WTX).

Operational management

WebSphere Message Broker supports a choice of interfaces for operation and administration of your brokers:

·         The Message Broker Toolkit.

·         Applications that use the Configuration Manager Proxy (CMP) API.

·         A comprehensive set of commands, that you can run interactively or by using scripts.

·         WebSphere Message Broker is available in several modes, depending upon your requirements.

Using WebSphere Message Broker in your business :

WebSphere Message Broker addresses the needs of business and application integration by managing the flow of information. It provides services, based on message brokers, to allow you to:

·         Route a message to several destinations, using rules that act on the contents of one or more of the fields in the message or message header.

·         Transform a message, so that applications using different formats can exchange messages in their own formats.

·         Store a message, or part of a message, in a database.

·         Retrieve a message, or part of a message, from a database.

·         Modify the contents of a message; for example, by adding data extracted from a database.

·      Publish a message to make it available to other applications. Other applications can choose to receive publications that relate to specific topics, or that have specific content, or both.

·    Create structured topic names, topic-based access control functions, content-based subscriptions, and subscription points.

·      Use a public interface to develop message processing node types that can be incorporated into the broker framework to complement or replace the supplied nodes, or to incorporate node types developed by independent software vendors (ISVs).

·     Enable instrumentation by products such as those developed by Tivoli, by using system management hooks.

The benefits of WebSphere Message Broker can be realized both within and outside your enterprise:

Your processes and applications can be integrated by providing message and data transformations in a single place, the broker. This integration helps to reduce the cost of application upgrades and modifications.

You can extend your systems to reach your suppliers and customers, by meeting their interface requirements within your brokers. This ability can help you to improve the quality of your interactions, and allow you to respond more quickly to changing or additional requirements.

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IBM Maximo

Introduction 

IBM Maximo Asset Management solutions give you a single point of control over all types of assets — production, infrastructure, facilities, transportation and communications — by managing them all on a common platform. This platform allows sharing and enforcement of best practices, inventory, resources and personnel. Now you can optimize the performance of your assets and maximize return on investment.Maximo Asset Management includes six management modules in an enhanced service-oriented architecture.

Asset management – Achieve the control you need to more efficiently track and manage asset and location data throughout the asset lifecycle.

Work management – Manage both planned and unplanned work activities, from initial request through completion and recording of actuals.

Service management – Define service offerings, establish service level agreements (SLAs), more proactively monitor service level delivery and implement escalation procedures.

Contract management – Gain complete support for purchase, lease, rental, warranty, labor rate, software, master, blanket and user-defined contracts.

Inventory management – Know the details of asset related inventory and its usage including what, when, where, how many and how valuable.

Procurement management – Support all the phases of enterprise-wide procurement such as direct purchasing and inventory replenishment. 

IBM Maximo Asset Management is an enterprise asset management (EAM) software solution product produced by IBM. It is a solution which is used to operate, maintain and dispose of enterprise assets.

 It focuses on the following types of assets:

·         Plant and production (for example oil, gas, chemicals, mining, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, food, electronics and power generation)

·         Infrastructure (including railways, highways, telecommunications, water and wastewater, and electric and gas distribution networks)

·         Transportation (for military, airlines, trucking, shipping, rail and other use)

·         Real estate and facilities (for example, in offices, schools and hospitals)

·         EAM is globally known to be critical in asset intensive industries, i.e., utilities, oil & gas, pharma., rail & transit, heavy manufacturing, and facilities including hospitals, campuses and hotel.

The current release, IBM Maximo Asset Management 7.5, is the third release built upon a J2EE Service Oriented Architecture. It is an Enterprise Asset Management, Service Management and IT asset management suite of applications that are scalable and easily integrated into existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.

The purpose of Enterprise Asset Management is to extend the useful life of capital assets. There are many other reasons why the demand for better asset management is on a rise -- organizations are increasingly raising the importance, risk, quantity and/or cost of their corporate critical or capital assets, and hence they often see a corresponding rise in interest by management to better maintain control and visibility of all these assets.

Furthermore, governments, regulatory bodies, shareholders and other key stakeholder groups have increased the pressure on organizations in both the public and private sectors to be able to locate and track asset whereabouts. The higher the risk or opportunity cost in not knowing where an asset is located, the greater the incentive for management to implement an asset tracking system. Industry leaders are using technology as a competitive advantage. Every maintenance and operation budget consists of major categories such as MRO inventory, labor costs, and unplanned downtime, which results in reactive spending, impacted asset utilization and capital expenditure on equipment that needs to be replaced because of wear.

Having Smarter Infrastructure is all about having more flexible infrastructures which can deliver insight, recommendations and can optimize asset usage across the enterprise; whether it is locomotives, bridges and roadways, universities, hospitals, retail stores. Today’s progressive organizations have embedded chips, sensors, RFID, GPS and other forms of instrumentation and intelligence to transform the way their business services are delivered.

FEAUTURES :

An entry-level member of the IBM® Maximo Asset Management product family

   Ø  Proven asset and work management solution and technology to meet your needs

 Ø  Manage critical assets using a single platform to leverage common business practices and a single repository for asset data.

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Introduction To FileNet

There are 2 solutions of Filenet:

i) Enterprise Content Management(ECM)

ii) Business Process Management(BPM)

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) :

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists.

In the quest for increased efficiency and profitability, organizations strive to incorporate more and more relevant information into their business processes inorder to make the right decision at the right time. Corporations want to enable their employees to search, retrieve, and review information in context, to limit exception handling and manual processing, to reduce costs, and improve service. It is important to have all the information needed and make the right decision that satisfies clients, partners, suppliers, and shareholders.The ability to make decisions better and faster is a real competitive advantage that IBM Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions can help provide. IBM ECM improves workforce effectiveness by enabling organizations to transform their business processes, access and manage all forms of content, secure and control information related to compliance needs, and optimize the infrastructure required to deliver content anywhere at anytime.IBM ECM helps organizations make quick, smart, and cost-effective decisions, right at the moment that it matters the most.

IBM FileNet Business Process Manager overview:(BPM)

IBM FileNet Business Process Manager (BPM) enables organizations to create, modify, manage, simulate, and analyze business processes. One of the key advantages of IBM FileNet Business Process Manager is its ability to work with active content.

Active content refers to the ability of content to trigger or affect business processes. For example, content such as a loan application or a claim application, received via fax, e-mail, or Web, can trigger a process in IBM FileNet Business Process Manager to process the loan or claim automatically. Active content includes the delivery of information in a way that is more unified, accurate, and contextual to the business processes. It enables a wide variety of process management scenarios.

IBM FileNet Business Process Manager can be used in many areas, including banking, insurance, manufacturing, health industry, and government. Examples in the banking and insurance industries include applications for processing loans, claims, credit card approvals and policy underwriting.

IBM FileNet Business Process Manager addresses the primary focus of business process management (that is, managing, transforming, and optimizing business processes). It provides the following functions:

Ø  Process automation

Ø  Process modeling and designing

Ø  Process integration

Ø  Process monitoring and optimization

Process automation:

IBM FileNet Business Process Manager (BPM) provides a Process Engine and a set of associated components and applications that enable easy implementation of robust business process management solutions designed for use by business users. BPM also provides a set of APIs to enable custom programming for automating processes and a flexible environment for process improvements.

Process modeling and designing :

IBM FileNet Business Process Manager makes a distinction between process modeling and process designing. Process modeling is done for any business process in the organization, including manual processes that are not expected to be automated. The goal of process modeling is to document and gain an understanding of the process. Process designing, on the other hand, is used to create executable processes. Process models can be created by tools such as WebSphere Business Modeler,

or Microsoft® Visio®. WebSphere Business Modeler is a tool specifically designed for process modeling and to simulate those processes. Microsoft Visio is a drawing tool that can be used to document business processes. In either case, the modeled processes can be used in IBM FileNet Business Process Manager.

IBM FileNet Business Process Manager offers Process Designer, a tool that creates executable processes. It can import Microsoft Visio diagrams and read XML process definition language (XPDL) files that are generated by WebSphere Business Modeler. In addition, Process Designer can read XPDL files generated by other tools. Process Designer can use these models as a starting point to create executable processes. IBM FileNet Business Process Manager also offers Process Simulator, a tool that is used to simulate these processes to identify bottlenecks and to play with “what if” scenarios.We discuss process design in more detail later in this book.

Process integration :

IBM FileNet Business Process Manager provides process integration capabilities with external applications and systems through Component Integrator, rules engine framework, and Web services. These integration options accelerate the speed of business process management solution development and reduce the overall costs associated with the development and maintenance of processes.We discuss process integration in more detail later in this book.

Process monitoring and optimization

Business processes have to be managed and monitored so they deliver the desired business goal. The monitoring of business processes can be done on two levels; either at the individual process instance or across all processes. An example of an individual process is the mortgage process for account 123. Monitoring the instance for account 123 will show the current state of that process instance. Individual process instances can be monitored in several ways. IBM FileNet Business Process Manager includes a tracker tool that displays the status of a particular process in a graphical environment similar to the Process Designer. There is also a milestone feature that can be used to define process milestones during the process modeling. This can be used to monitor the status of the 6 Introducing IBM FileNet Business Process Managerprocess. In the mortgage case, some milestones might include application received, in process, approved, and rejected. In this scenario, a business analyst can be assigned as the tracker for a particular mortgage process and the customer can be provided with access to the milestone view of the process.For monitoring and analysis of all the processes, IBM FileNet Business Process Manager offers Process Analyzer and Business Activity Monitor (BAM). Process Analyzer enables users to evaluate process workload, discover processing trends, and identify bottleneck areas. Business Activity Monitor lets managers monitor various aspects of their business operations, set thresholds, and automate actions to react to thresholds being exceeded. Information collected by process monitoring can be used for optimization. For newly designed processes, simulation is a technique that can be used to play with “what if” scenarios and detect bottlenecks before placing the process into production. IBM FileNet Business Process Manager offers Process Simulator, which can be used to analyze processes and evaluate how they behave in different scenarios. Process Simulator can be populated with data from Process Analyzer to work with processes that are already in production.

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IBM Portal and Web Experience Factory overview

What is WebSphere Portal?

WebSphere Portal is a framework--including a runtime server, services, tools, and many other features--that you can use to integrate your enterprise into a single, customizable interface called a portal. An enterprise portal combines components, applications, processes, and content from a wide variety of sources into a unified presentation, which your users can access from a wide variety of devices.

You can customize the portal based on user or job roles, security needs, device settings, personal preferences, and administrative settings. You can also define workflows to support your business processes. You can manage your portal's content using IBM's Web Content Management, which is integrated with WebSphere Portal. Figure 1 shows an example company portal.

While WebSphere Portal binds your work environment into a cohesive interface, it also provides services to enhance the user experience so that the unified interface is much richer than if you were using the individual components.

For example, it provides single sign-on services so that, once users are logged into your portal, they can access all the underlying applications without having to re-enter user credentials (such as userids and passwords). You can plug in the look-and-feel for your portal's pages using customizable themes. Using the collaboration services API, you can enable users to easily engage peers to expedite work processes. Using cooperative portlets, applications can exchange information, either automatically or with user control. These are just a few examples of the ways you can easily extend your portal environment and optimize your users' experience with it.

WebSphere Portal is a core part of IBM Workplace. Numerous other related products, including WebSphere Voice and the WebSphere Everyplace products, work with WebSphere Portal to enable users to access applications running on virtually any operating system. Users can access the portal from all types of devices, such as Web browsers, rich clients, mobile phones, and PDAs.

IBM Web Experience Factory:

IBM Web Experience Factory creates applications with rich, interactive digital experiences for delivery on desktop browsers, smartphones, tablets and IBM Worklight. This rapid application development tool enables developers to build custom web portlets, widgets and applications for IBM WebSphere® Portal, IBM Worklight and IBM WebSphere Application Server environments. IBM Web Experience Factory provides preconfigured, Java platform-based tools that can help automate and accelerate the web application development process.

IBM Web Experience Factory features:

·     Advanced multi-channel Java platform-based development tools that help simplify and automate the process of building custom multi-channel web portlets and applications.

·         Pre-built, reusable builders that enable rapid application development and deployment.

·   Rich interactive interfaces that deliver exceptional digital experiences on desktop browsers, smartphones, tablets and IBM Worklight.

·         Tight integration with WebSphere Portal that extends your current portal infrastructure to create dynamic, personalized web applications.

·       A flexible development platform with standards-based tools that integrate with your computing environment.

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