	Bridging the gap between document publishing and e-business		Table of contents		Indexes		An XML information server for advanced B2B architectures

eBusiness through EIP and XML

Mikula, Norbert H.

Norbert H. Mikula

Chief Technology Officer

DataChannel, Chief Technical Officer, OASIS, 600 108th Ave NE
Suite 900
Bellevue Washington 98007 USA
Phone: +1 425 462 1999 email: norbert@datachannel.com web site: www.datachannel.com

Biography

Norbert Mikula — Mikula is responsible for directing DataChannel's efforts in the XML standards bodies as well as further advancing DataChannel's leadership in the arena of XML and Enterprise Information Portals. He developed one of the first XML parsers (NXP) and has been engaged in XML-related efforts since the early days of this standard. Currently, Mikula also serves as Chief Technical Officer on the board of directors of OASIS - the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. He is a member of the XML.org Steering Committee and he represents his company at the ebXML initiative. He is the author of numerous whitepapers and articles and has been a speaker and track-chair at a variety of national and international conferences and industry events. Mikula holds a "Diplom Ingenieur" degree in Applied Computer Science from the University of Klagenfurt, Austria.

eBusiness and XML

When people think about business to business communication they often have machine-to-machine communication in mind. However, we believe there is more to eBusiness than simply connecting one's internal systems with those of business partners. For the purposes of this paper, we want to introduce a different way of looking at eBusiness.

Transaction oriented

Building connectivity between an enterprises business systems and the ones of my customers and suppliers, as well enabling secure and reliable (XML based) messaging lies at the heart of modern B2B machine to machine oriented solutions. Often you will see this combined with ability to define and execute complex business procedures based on configureable inter- and intracompany workflows.

Document/content oriented

Document/content oriented B2B exchange of design drawings, contract negotiations, RFQ, RFP and RFI development etc. Typically these sorts of operations are conducted between human participants and involve collaborative work on unstructured content. Secure and personalized access is of utmost importance in such environments.

Business intelligence oriented

Very often human beings will be involved and have to make quick and informed (!) decisions to allow a business process to continue smoothly to the next step. High performing, secure and reliable machine to machine processes are of importance, but what is the point of high transaction throughput between machines, if the human being(s) involved take hours/days to do their part?

A true eBusiness strategy, we believe, will have to take these and many other aspects of business interactions in order to truly exploit the capabilities of Internet-based electronic commerce. The following sections will outline some of the components that, we believe, are necessary for a comprehensive eBusiness strategy based on XML and related standards.

The XML backbone

eBusiness does not start with the pretty-face of a shopping cart application or with sending around lean XML messages. The real work starts at the heart of your enterprise. Two important factors,

Building re-usable infrastructure

A typical enterprise will devote 35 - 40% of its programming budget to develop and maintain‘extract and update’ programs whose purpose is solely to transfer information between different databases and legacy systems. (Gartner Group)

To a large extent this problem stems from the fact that developers have to provide mappings between all the proprietary systems. XML will help us to build a reusable infrastructure in which, instead of building all the point-to-point connections, we will be able to only deal with one uniform XML-based abstraction layer.

Legacy data integration

Only a comparatively small amount of all corporate data is readily available in database systems and the like. The vast wealth of corporate intelligence lies in e-mails, pictures, documents and other such data formats. The integration of these sources and the systems that manage these source is of strategic importance.

Many of the systems to be considered will not be ready for integration into web-based delivery. Very often they will have to first be prepared for delivering XML content and hooked up to some transport infrastructure.

The vision of the XML backbone is one where all relevant corporate data and metadata (we can't forget about our blobs after all) is being passed around between systems and humans using XML-based structures. All legacy systems, databases, content management solutions etc. are being integrated into this conceptual enterprise-wide layer.

It is important to note that the XML backbone does not make any assumptions about underlying transport protocols. Whether your environment is based on http, FTP, some message-oriented middleware (MOM), DCOM, CORBA etc. does not matter. What is important, is that all the data is XML-based, instead of some mix of proprietary data formats, like it is often the case today.

XML-based EIP

XML-based EIPs are natural consumers and participants of the XML backbone. While the XML backbone provides the data and metadata necessary for the portal, the portal itself regulates secure and personalized access to this information provided.

Typically, XML-based EIPs will use XML in at least three different ways :

XML for data

This ties nicely into the XML backbone. Having all of our data exposed in XML is a strategic imperative (where it makes it sense). This not only helps to build better portals, but also to build better IT infrastructure.

XML for metadata

Not all data in an organization will be XML. We can, however, use XML-based meta-content descriptions to describe relevant information about the blob items we are interested in managing. Of course, this metacontent still also applies to XML-based content.

XML in the EIP

In a truly XML-based portal not only the managed resources (and their metacontent) of a portal will be managed through XML. The software itself will be based on using XML to provide internal datastructures and abstraction layers. This internal datastructures (including access control list and user interface controls), once exposed through XML, create - in conjunction with XSL/CSS stylesheets - a unique user experience for the customer. Not only for HTML but for any other conceivable output format.

EIP functionality

Enterprise Information Portals, whether they are used in an Intranet scenario to bring information to employees or in an Extranet/e-business scenario, have a certain set of minimal features.

Categorization

An EIP needs to provide a configureable taxonomy (a hierarchical view of all Enterprise data resources). End users need to be able to introduce their own categorization schemes.

Personaliczation

The set of information that one user works with is not necessarily appropriate for another. Thus, the system needs to slice and dice data to optimize access for each individual end user. Also each user (or group of users) has their own ideas about how the user interface has to be designed. Good personalization allows to control this on a per user as well as per group bases.

Publishing

Everybody can publish. It is of utmost importance, that everybody, from the worker to the CEO can easily contribute content to the system (at best in a straightforward drag and drop fashion). TheWebDAV specification appears to be an ideal candidate for a supporting protocol in the area.

WebDAV

Collaboration

We live in a team-oriented environment, both as internal teams as well as in conjunction with our business partners, we work collaboratively on tasks. EIP technology needs to help promote such activities. WebDAV comes in very handy, again.

Extensibility

Every customer is different. Using XML and XSL technology consistently throughout the system allows a portal vendor - if supported by the sofware - (or any other software vendor, for that matter), to provide the highest degree of customizability ever.

Scripting

The best system cannot anticipate all rules and extensions a customer wants to see. Server side scripting and powerful APIs allow to better trim the system towards the requirements at hand.

Notification

It would not be very efficient if the user of a portal system had to check periodically for updates to existing content or this arrivale of new information. The portal itself must know about what is relevant for the user and pro-actively send notifcications which inform the user about a state change is the system.

Extend your enterprise

The browser has long lost its status as the most important means to get access to information. While it still is one of the primary means, a whole new set of devices are emerging on the horizon. Cell phones, PDA, car based systems etc. reflect the demands of a modern - very mobile - workforce.

XML to the rescue

Where would we be without XML? Really in trouble, likely! Each of these new devices has its own ideas and requirements of how data should be structured to best suite its needs. Imagine what hustle it would be to translate from the proprietary data formats of your backend systems to all the individual output formats of mobile devices such as WML, HDML and HTML (just to mention a few). Actually, also the data formats for output devices would likely be very complex as well.

The complete picture

In the graphic below you can see what an overall combination of XML Backbone, XML based EIP and delivery to various output devices can look like, from an architectural perspective.


	Bridging the gap between document publishing and e-business		Table of contents		Indexes		An XML information server for advanced B2B architectures