Using Web Services To Integrate a .NET Solution with EMC Documentum

Using Web Services to Integrate a .NET solution with EMC Documentum Tim Harmon SVP of Corporate Development Planview Joshua Toub Practice Manager Blue Fish Development Group

About Planview
Recognized Industry Leader
Pioneered in 1989 what is now Portfolio Management
Recognized leader by major analyst firms
Customer Base of Market Leaders
400+ customers across all industries
Global enterprises as well as mid-market customers
Global Presence and Financially Strong
Headquartered in Austin, TX
Presence in 30+ countries
30% year-over-year growth since 2002
Profitable since 1993

Planview Enterprise

Drivers
Leverage the industry’s premium content and collaboration management for content-intensive Planview Enterprise projects and initiatives
Provide EMC Documentum users with a portfolio management solution for New Product Development and IT Project Management
Enable users to consolidate Planview Enterprise content and related content in a single repository
Enforce regulatory compliance on Planview-related content

Planview Enterprise + EMC Documentum ECM
Manage portfolio metrics (Targets and Progress) in Planview
Store, access, and manage Planview-related content in Documentum
Apply Planview Lifecycle processes to content in Documentum
Apply Planview Access Control rules to content in Documentum
Planview Enterprise + EMC Documentum ECM
Unified ECM Platform
Advanced Content Features
Regulatory Compliance
Portfolio Management
Structured Processes
Best Practices

Use Case: Adding a Project

Use Case: Browse Content

Design Challenges
Integration approach
Application level integration (WDK)
Model layer integration (data synchronization)
Disparate security models
.NET and Java intercommunication
Handling Planview’s distributed modification architecture
Externalizing Planview’s content management functionality

Implementation Challenges
Data synchronization
Object naming problems
Cross-platform Cryptography
Web Services
Creating and maintaining user mappings
Testing across multiple platforms and isolated development teams

Integration Approach
Initial plan: Webtop customizations fetch folder hierarchies from Planview
Disadvantages with this approach:
Pervasiveness of folders in Webtop—many independent customization points
Webtop customization required for basic integration features—prevents other Documentum tools from leveraging the integration
Revised plan: Web services perform background data synchronization
Few integration points
Planview data available to all Documentum-based tools and applications

Why Web Services?
Loosely coupled integration
Enabled separate development teams to build the .NET and Java integration components in relative isolation from one another
Avoided the prerequisite of having full end-to-end environments setup for both development teams
The Documentum (Java) side of the integration tested against stubs
Forward compatibility
WSF
Simple to create and deploy
Good tools for both .NET and Java

Architecture

Implementation Overview
Web Services
SBOs
Binding Documentum and Planview users
Single Sign-On
Data synchronization
Security
Webtop customizations

Web Services

Web Services: WSF and Basic Integration WS
WSF:
Could not use WSF because of 5.2.5 compatibility requirements
Comparison to WSF:
Both use Axis
Similar authentication procedures
WSF deploys web services via the global BOF registry; we deploy independent of the Content Server
Basic Integration Web Services
Was not available yet
Planview web services used as inspiration for BIWS

SBOs
Integration extensively leverages SBOs
Requirement to support Content Server 5.2.5 precluded the use of the global registry
SBO listing:
IBindUserService: maps Planview users to Documentum users
IContentService: retrieves content-related information
ICreateUserService: creates Documentum users
IDQLPassthroughService: transparent DQL passthrough
ResultSet translated into XML return value
Supports both read and modify queries
IFolderSynchronizationService: structure synchronization
IRecycleBinService: methods for soft deletion and cleanup of recycle bin
ISnapshotService: generates DOM snapshots of structure and security
ISyncService: interleaved structure and security synchronization

User Binding & Single Sign-On
Authenticating Planview users in Documentum
How do we associate Documentum users with Planview Enterprise users?
How do we streamline authentication?
User binding
“ Just in Time” binding
Binding persisted in Planview
Single Sign-On
Custom SSO implementation
No dependencies on third party SSO libraries
Uses Documentum principal authentication
Integrated into binding operation

Data Synchronization
Data synchronization: a classic enterprise integration challenge
How can we ensure the integrity and “freshness” of mutable data across multiple systems?
Our approach:
Planview is the master
Use multiple synchronization services to maximize integrity while maintaining performance
Full Sync: A complete graph of all Planview data stored in Documentum
Used initially for population and then periodically to ensure consistency
Incremental Sync: Individual per-element modifications performed within the scope of a Planview transaction
Lots of unit testing

Synchronization Example

Security Challenges
How to reconcile different security models?
Planview: implied rules-based security
Documentum: explicit ACL-based security
Initial solution: Planview precomputes security for each node and sends explicit security for each and every node
Complications:
Creates extremely verbose messages
Certain security scenarios would have been difficult/prohibitively expensive to precompute
Planview ‘portfolios’ widen security access

Security: Modified Solution
Compress synchronization message with ‘hints’
Hints specify how security settings are propagated to children
Recursive mode and direct mode
Apply some rules within Documentum
Expand security to every node in the hierarchy
Logically merge security settings for multiply-linked objects
Merges permissions from multiple ACLs into a new ACL
Interesting semantics that sometimes dictate a ‘maxi-merge’ and sometimes dictate a ‘mini-merge’

Webtop Customizations
Auto-navigation to a specific folder
Subclassed the Main component to override onInit()
Recycle bin
DeleteFolder and DeleteDocument component extensions intercept deletion requests
Soft deletes are performed for content within the Planview folder hierarchy
Handled by the RecycleBin SBO
Hard deletes for all other objects
Handled by the stock DeleteFolder and DeleteDocument components
RecycleBinCleaner
Asynchronous thread that removes empty folders from the recycle bin
Show Locked component
Retrieves locked documents
URL interface for direct invocation from Planview
Subclasses the Search component

Use Case: Show Locked Documents

Present and Future…
Current Status
DfD certified
Future Directions
Performance enhancements
Better use of groups
Clamp down on ACL proliferation

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Using Web Services To Integrate a .NET Solution with EMC Documentum

by BlueFish on Feb 06, 2007

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