elena lowery, ibm — duncan kenzie, bcd

ELENA LOWERY, IBM — DUNCAN KENZIE, BCD

Elena LowreyCompanies have been using computers for information processing for such a long time that I have come across applications written 20 to 25 years ago that are still in use today. As an iSeries customer, you can probably relate to this experience. If we look at the user interface of these applications, we’ll find 5250 green-screen applications, some fast client applications, and of course Web applications. All these applications provide solid business functionality, but we can extend them to make them more usable and more efficient for our end users.

Application Challenges in Today’s EnvironmentLet me give you some examples of some of the challenges that end users face today when they use these different applications.

• Different look and feel. How you interact with a green-screen application is different from how you interact with a Web application. These differences might require some training for people who are not used to the different types of interfaces.

• Different logon requirements. The second challenge for users is logging in to these different applications. Having to log in to each different application is an inconvenience for the end user, and maintaining all the different passwords is also a headache for the administrator.

• Different requirements for sharing information. Another challenge is sharing information between these different applications. Most likely, the applications are deployed on different systems, or they are written in different program languages, so they must be manually integrated. If we can automate this integration, we can definitely improve the information-sharing process.

Elena Lowery is a software engineer at IBM Rochester. She currently works in the IBM eServer Custom Technology Center, where she designs and develops custom applications for IBM customers and business partners. Her areas of expertise include Java, XML, Web services, and Internet software development.

Duncan Kenzie is the president of BCD Technical Support, the development and support group for ProGen WebSmart, the popular Web-development and deployment tool specifically designed for iSeries-i5-AS/400 servers. Duncan has 28 years of experience on the midrange system platform in creating programmer productivity tools for both green-screen and native Web environments. He is a published author of several technical articles on programming on the midrange platform and a frequent speaker at COMMON.

In this article, Elena will discuss the benefits of portal technology, including application integration, whether to use RPG or Java, how to make the best use of prebuilt portlets, and how document management within a portal environment provides your enterprise with secure, managed access to information. Duncan will then present BCD’s report-distribution product, Catapult, and BCD’s free portal product, Nexus, which incorporates Web document management.

What’s the solution to this problem? A portal. A portal is a Web application that provides a single point of access to different applications. With a portal, the business-logic layer, or the back end of these applications, can still reside on different servers. The applications can still be implemented in different programming languages, but a portal can present a single, Web-based user interface.

Portal FeaturesBefore we get into the business benefits of a portal, let’s look at some of the functions, or features, that you get in a portal page. I already mentioned that a portal is a Web application, so you access a portal in the same way you access a regular Web application. You bring up a browser, and you type in a URL that brings up a portal page. You might look at this screenshot and think, “This looks just like a regular Web application. So what’s unique about it?” Here are some hints for looking at a Web page and determining whether it’s a portal implementation:• Personalization. The first common element you see in

a portal is a portal theme (Figure 1). A portal theme

usually consists of a header, which may include a company logo. But it’s also a set of fonts and colors that are used throughout the portal. It forces consistency between the different applications and makes it a little bit easier for a user to use and get used to. You will also notice that we have outlined little boxes on the portlet page here. These little boxes are actually portlets. They are applications that run in a portal. The area around a portlet, this border, is called portlet skin. Both portlet theme and portlet skin are customizable components. Usually when you buy a portal solution, you will get some predefined themes and skins, but you can also develop your own. For example, you can develop a set of fonts and colors and logos that can be used in your company’s portal.

• Customization. The next very important feature of portals is being able to customize not only the look and feel of a portal but also the content of a portlet. Notice here that on each title bar of a portlet, I have an Edit icon. I can click this Edit icon, and it will take me into the Customization, or Edit, mode of a portlet. Let’s take a look at this sample Customer Maintenance portlet. If I go into the Edit mode of this portlet, I can select customers that I work with.

Figure 1: Portals

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gyElena Lowrey and Duncan Kenzie

Figure 2: What is a Portal = Single User Experience

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The next time I log in to the portal, I won’t see the entire list of the customers but only the customers that are interesting to me.

As I already mentioned, there are several portlets on this page, and in this screenshot I have three portlets. There is no limit to how many portlets you can put on a page. But you probably should use some common sense. If you put 50 or 100 portlets on a page, it would be difficult to view them all at the same time. As you start interacting with this portal, you will notice that portlets can talk to each other. You usually have some kind of communication between portlets. In this particular example, I have a Reports portlet. And if I click an icon of one of the listed reports, I can display a report in a different portlet.

• Navigation. Another important feature of portals is the ability to group portlets into several layers. I can create a nested hierarchy of pages, so I can group portlets by business function. For example, I might have a page for Collaboration portlets, or for Accounting portlets, or for Order Maintenance portlets.

Business Benefits of PortalsNow that you have a high-level overview of portal features, let’s talk a little bit about the business benefits that these features can provide you. We’re talking about different ways to personalize and customize portal experience, from the look and feel of portals, to navigation, to the content of the portlets. Another very important benefit that portals bring to you is role-based security that provides single sign-on capability. One of the challenges I mentioned with applications today is that different applications deployed on different systems and written in different program languages require users to log on to each one of those systems separately. With a portal, you can configure single sign-on capability (Figure 2). You log in to your portal, which is a Web page, once, and then log in to all the back-end systems through the portal framework. Role-based security means you can create one portal through which your portal administrator will have access to all the back-end systems. Then you can create user groups that may have access only to certain systems. Let me give you an example. If I have a group of managers and regular employees, I probably want to allow my managers unlimited

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access to all eight job portlets, but my group of employees can see only certain portlets. They also might not be able to edit the content of some portlets. Thus, in portals you can implement a very granular level of security with role-based structure.

Portal ImplementationNext, let’s look at how portals are implemented. Portals are a more sophisticated type of Web application, and they need to run in middleware that’s called a portal server. A portal server is actually an application, and this application can be deployed either in a Web server, such as an Apache HTTP server, or in an application server. It can be a Java application server, such as Tomcat or WebSphere Application Server. I’m giving you all these different options because there are may portal vendors out there, and they all have different implementations. When you purchase a portal server, you get this framework that provides the business values already explained. But what you really want to do is build your portlets. Portlets are applications that run inside a portal server. And if you want to develop portlets, you have two choices. You can create them from scratch, or you can use portlet builders. If you were to develop these portlets yourself, depending on your portal server, you would write them in a scripting language with HTML. Or if your portal server is implemented in Java, you would write your portlets in Java. Portlet builders are tools that can help you create portlets without having to write any code from scratch.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) PortletsFinally, note that much of the business value of portals comes from portlets that are shipped with the portal server. One thing we want to discuss is how Enterprise Content Management portlets can help you simplify your content-management infrastructure. The challenge with ECM today is that you have documents of different types that are deployed on different servers. If you want your end users to access these documents, you’ll probably have to map a drive. You have to worry about authority. And ECM also makes it difficult to search information between the documents that are deployed on different servers. The solution that you get with an ECM portlet is that it allows you to have a navigation portlet that contains Display and Open so you can see all the documents that may be physically located on different servers. If you click an item in a navigation portlet, a document will also be displayed in another portlet. You won’t have to install different viewers for this portlet on your desktop. Everything is displayed in a Web environment.

Duncan KenzieWe’re now going to be talking about the benefits of Enterprise Content Management within portals. We’re also going to be discussing how you can get content from existing legacy applications into the portals with no programming required. You probably have many spool files on your systems that represent valuable information. There’s a gold mine of information sitting on your iSeries that’s just waiting to be mined and to be unlocked. And that information is the result of years of development work. Or maybe it represents software packages that you have purchased, and it contains a distillation of all the data you have and it’s presented in a meaningful way on those reports. So it would be really useful if you had a way to conveniently mine that data, to transform it and distribute it readily to end users.

CatapultWith Catapult, one of our products at BCD, you can automatically capture, transform, and distribute iSeries spool files. The nice thing about Catapult is that it runs unattended on a PC. It polls your iSeries to see when reports arrive on spool files and on output queues that you designate. It captures those reports in real time. And then, through simple rules that you define, it can transform and distribute those reports. There is no programming required to do this. One of the other great features about Catapult is that it logs all the activity that takes place. If you’re concerned, say, about Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, Catapult will handle that. It will provide all of the auditing you need for soft compliance. And you can impose tight security constraints to make sure that reports don’t end up in the wrong hands.

Capture PhaseCatapult’s capture phase involves monitoring specific output queues. When you do that, you can say that you want to pick reports off of output queues based on one or more attributes of the spool files. I might choose spool files for a particular user, or a job name — for example, I run an accounts receivable report every day. I might have a job name of AR Report. I can monitor for that. Or I can monitor by report name, or forms name, or any combination of those elements. And when I capture the report, I can have Catapult tell the system to capture the entire report and distribute it or to take sections of the report. In the process of taking sections of the report, Catapult actually goes through a transformation process to split the report.

Transform PhaseTransforming is the next stage of the process to distribute our report. As I mentioned, you can split existing spool files

into new subreports. We’ll see some screenshots that show how you define the rules for doing that. At that time, you can convert your report, either the whole report or the split sections, into HTML documents, into PDF documents, or into graphics. If you have AFP spool files, you can create TIFF graphics out of them into rich-text files (RTF), Excel spreadsheets, or Adobe Acrobat PDF, in which you can encrypt, compress, or create graphics overlays. You can take a basic report, such as an invoice report, for example, and you can create a beautiful invoice from it for each report. With the spool-file PDF generator that’s included with Catapult, there’s no need to purchase a separate Adobe PDF writer. All the code for producing the PDF is part of the Catapult product, and it offers a lot of power in terms of how you can transform your report. You can have the generator automatically generate bookmarks from selected text on the original report. If you had a report with a listing of sales data by salesperson, for example, you could have the generator create a bookmark for each new salesperson on the report. You can optionally control things such as the font, the page size, and all those kinds of file elements as well.

Case ExamplesHere are a couple of examples of how some of our clients use Catapult for transforming and for splitting. We have a telephone company client that splits a single report into multiple, individual phone-bill files. And they add a graphics overlay to produce a professional-looking statement for each one of those phone bills. They then have the option within Catapult to automatically e-mail the report to their customers. They can do that a couple of ways. They can set up a separate file of e-mail addresses that ties into Catapult, or they can pull the e-mail address directly off the report. They also can derive an e-mail address from the report by cross-referencing it to a file. They used to have to print their bills on regular paper. Many productivity tools are built in to Catapult to make it easy for you to distribute your data. Another example of Catapult’s benefits, as I mentioned earlier, is a sales report. Let’s say you have a sales report that lists sales by territory or by salesperson. You can split the report by salesperson. And then if you choose not to e-mail it to the salesperson but instead want to put it on

Figure 3: Green-screen view of spool file to grab

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the company portal, you can have Catapult send the report to the portal.

NexusNexus is our portal product, and it has all the functionality that Elena described earlier. Nexus has features such as single sign-on, the capability to set up portlets, and portlet builders. It has role-based security, and it also has Enterprise Content Management features. That means you can automatically see reports from Catapult and from your iSeries spool files, you can transform them, and you can feed them directly into the Nexus portal. In this case, each salesperson could access his or her own particular report via a portal user ID. And you can build in to Nexus and Catapult security constraints that ensure that each individual salesperson has access only to the reports each is entitled to, the ones that belong to that salesperson. And you’ll see some examples of this, too.

Distribution PhaseCatapult enables intelligent distribution. Because it can automatically identify the intended recipient based on the

report contents, you don’t have to write any code to determine to whom a report will go. You just define a rule that says, “On this part of the report, I have this information that identifies who is going to get the report.” You can split the report, and you can also transform the contents of the report into brand-new reports. For example, if you use the EZ-Pickin’s interface — EZ-Pickin’s is another product that you can buy as an add-on to Catapult — you can say, “Let’s take all this detail information, then let’s summarize it. Let’s take out points of data on the report, extract them, summarize them, and create a brand-new report.” You can create Excel documents this way, and you can create graphs and charts. Again, in the case of the salesperson’s report, let’s say you have a detail listing of sales by salespeople, and you want to just create a summary for the month of sales for all salespeople, and you want to create a graph from that. It’s easy to do by creating a transformation rule within Catapult. In terms of distribution targets, with Catapult you can send to fax, you can e-mail, you can archive the documents on a network drive or on the IFS, and you can print documents. This might seem silly since you’re grabbing spool files, but there are times

Figure 4: CL program - insert command to run Catapult

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Figure 5: Run from an iSeries program

Figure 6: Spool file transformed as PDF with bookmarks

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when you might want to print to a local, non-iSeries-connected printer. This capability is helpful for doing that. And you can, of course, distribute to the Nexus portal for the report to appear in Enterprise Content Management portlets. That’s the part we’re going to focus on now.

Leverage Legacy CodeYou can use Catapult to leverage existing legacy code. We have an example in which we’ve modified the CL program of a Web program that runs an existing green-screen report to include an interface to Catapult — to grab a report, index it, e-mail it, and distribute it to the Nexus portal — to the ECM in the Nexus portal. Here is a typical green-screen view of a spool file (Figure 3). The next screen (Figure 4) shows how I’ve modified my CL program to embed a simple command that will run a Catapult Grab rule, and it will e-mail the report to a given e-mail address. Below that we have an example of a rule for distributing to the Nexus portal. This is where we’ve inserted the command. We could run the report either from a 5250 green-screen prompt, or, in this case, we’ve created a little Web program that runs the report (Figure 5). In this case, we’ve chosen category limits for our report, and we run the report. This

is the resulting PDF that has come out of the report from Catapult (Figure 6). You’ll notice that the PDF has an overlay of graphics in it. It has headings, and it has page numbers for the bookmarks, so we can go to specific pages within the PDF. Also, we’ve chosen this example to send an e-mail to the recipient of the report. Catapult automatically sends the e-mail, along with a header, and provides the report as an attachment (Figure 7). You can find this Web program on our Web site, at www.Excelsystems.com. Go to the WebSmart area. You can run example programs that do these kinds of things and show you how we interface with Catapult. In the next step, the PDF is added to the Nexus portal (Figure 8). Here you’re looking at a view of one of the Enterprise Content Manager portlets. You can configure these portlets within Nexus so that different users have access to different reports. You can have security restraints placed upon them so the users can access only certain reports. You can also provide certain search options. This is the user’s Web portal view. This is where users could type in a search value to find the report. In this case, they’ve typed in Item Listing, which is how the Catapult rule distributed the report. We see the two hits over on the right-hand side, and now users

Figure 7: Catapult e-mails report as attachment

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Figure 9: Catapult Example — No code required

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User’s Web Portal View

User clicks on Report toview as PDF

Search for ‘Item Listing’

Figure 8: Adds PDF to Nexus Portal

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No Code RequiredNow let’s look at how you can use Catapult with no code required. In this case, you’re looking at the user interface for the Catapult console (Figure 9). The Catapult console is where you define the rules that determine which reports will be pulled off of your iSeries. This is a PC-based application that you run on a PC as a server. The PC is talking to the AS/400 and looking for new spool files as they arrive on the output queues. We’ve organized our rules, and I’ve created a rule called Invoices to Nexus ECM. I’ve stored that rule in my own folder called Duncan’s WebCast Demo. You can organize the rules that you define to manage them easily. This is how I go about defining that specific rule. This is general information related to the rule — just the name of the rule and the fact that it’s active (Figure 10). Here is where I define the selection criteria for grabbing the report from my spool files. In this case, I have an output queue name of QPRINT, and then I have user data that indicates the name of the report I want. Once a report — a spool file — arrives on QPRINT, with the user data KRWINVINQ, Catapult will pick that to match on this rule. And it will pick all pages (Figure 11). Then I can decide where a report is going to start and end and be split into its pieces. In this case, I’ve highlighted the heading on each page of

Figure 10: Catapult interface - Define a grab rule

Figure 11: Catapult interface - Criteria to select spool file

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the report as the start of the split (Figure 12). You can see in the black box that’s highlighted up above that it has defined the actual text to split on at that point. That becomes my rule for splitting the report into subreports. I can also tell Catapult the key value that I want to split on (Figure 13). The key value is the piece of information that will be uniquely identified for this particular subreport. So when the report is split, it will create an invoice number key value for each section of the report. There’s the key value, and it’s put up into the top part of the screen. Figure 14 shows the interface to the Nexus ECM. This interface to Nexus is done directly within Catapult. Here we’re telling the system that when we publish this to Nexus, it’s going to have a document description that consists of two

variable names plus the word Invoice. We’ll see what those variables are in a second here. So &W1 Invoice &W2 is the name that’s going to appear in the next portal. We don’t have to worry about how this is all handled by Catapult; it automatically converts this to whatever format we want, splits it, and posts it to the portal page, all behind the scenes with no user intervention. Okay, now here are the variables that we’ve defined for our report (Figure 15). We’ve defined the invoice number, and that invoice number now becomes part of the report title. Every report that goes into Nexus ECM has its own unique name. That name also becomes the search value for the Nexus ECM. Within the Enterprise Content Management portlet, we could search for INVNUM= and a range of invoice numbers. We‘ll demonstrate that in a moment.

Defines text to split on

Hi-lite start of split

Figure 12: Split report — Start and end of split boundaries

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This is what the green-screen spool file of the actual report that we’re using for this report looks like (Figure 16). This gives you a sense of what the report will look like when it is transformed and posted to the portal. Here is what the report looks like when we view it in Catapult (Figure 17). This view offers a convenient way for us to define our rules. Again, I can highlight things on the report, and they become a part of the index data values for the report. By highlighting the company name — the customer name on the report — we’ve created a new data value.

Live DemoNow I’m going to show you the Nexus ECM in action, so I’m going to share a Web browser with you, and you can see it at

work. This is our own internal portal. We actually use our own products, and we use them extensively for helping us with our daily work. I’m going to log in with my AS/400 user ID. One of the features of Nexus is that you have the option to use your own AS/400 user ID. What you’re looking at here is a set of portlets that appear on my home page. I have portlets that let me access our Knowledge Base and spool files by typing in my user profile. I can get a list of spool files that exist on the system. I have messaging capabilities. I have a set of links down here, and I also have a set of documents that I have access to. These ESDI Admin documents that you see here are part of our Enterprise Content Manager internal usage. Now I’m going to show you the Navigator view of the Enterprise Content Manager. When I go to this particular view, you see

Key ValuesHi-lite key anchor

Figure 13: Split report — Key value to split on — Invoice number

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where there is interaction between the portlets, as Elena pointed out earlier. The interaction is such that if I click a particular part of the tree on the left, the content on the right changes. Also, the “breadcrumbs” up on the top show you where you are within the tree. I can navigate through the tree by clicking it, or I can search for values. If I search for the word interview, I get a window that pops up with a bunch of hits to the word interview. You also can create your own indexes to the documents as you post them to the Enterprise Content Manager. If I click Interview Questions, I can see a list of the kinds of questions that we ask potential candidates when they come to interview with us. What you’re looking at here are documents we have created and posted to the Nexus ECM. They might be documents that reside on our local PCs or on network drives, which we then add to the ECM, or they might be documents that we create directly within Nexus. We can create our own rich-text documents directly within the portal product using the editing tool provided. I want to show you now how within the portal we can find

documents that have come from Catapult. You’ll remember that when we defined the Catapult rule earlier for the invoice report, we created a key called INVNUM. A search for INVNUM = 200* finds all the documents that have invoice numbers that start with the numbers 200 that have automatically been generated for us and transformed from our iSeries spool files and posted to the Nexus ECM. Here you can see a list of these invoices. To view one of these invoices, all I have to do is simply click it, and I can see its contents. In this particular case, what we did is an overlay of graphics, which was all defined within the Catapult Grab rule. Using Catapult, we created several subreports from a typical green-screen spool file. We were able to index the invoice automatically and then post it to the Nexus portal, the ECM portal/portlet, for viewing and for searching. Catapult lets us define any kind of search criteria that we’d like so we can do these types of searches. It’s both powerful and flexible. We also can define the security constraints for any

Document name in Nexus portal

Figure 14: Interface to Nexus ECM — Document descriptions

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particular document. Let’s go back to my particular page. Because I’m a site manager, I have access to the Enterprise Content Management rules. I can define the rule for when a report arrives in the Nexus ECM. I can define what the security constraints are. The particular rule that I’m using is the Invoice rule. And we have some rule authorities here. First, the Invoice rule says the invoice is identified by the Grab number. That’s the number of the Grab rule that we created from Catapult. Then, under the Rule Authorities, I can say who is authorized either to read or write this report. In this particular case, we’ve given Read authority to everybody, and we’ve given Write authority to Chris and to me. That means Chris and I can actually manage a report. If we choose to remove the report from the ECM, we can. Anybody else can search for the report and look at it, but that’s all they can do. The system offers very powerful controls over who can get to our data, our reports, and our information and who has what sort of authority to manage that content.

Case StudyNow let’s look at a case study that involves Nexus. One of our clients, Covenant Transport, was looking for a portal solution. They looked at some of the larger offerings out there from some of the larger companies, and they evaluated the cost in terms of the price of the software itself and in terms of the system requirements to run the portal product. I should point out that

Figure 16: Spool file of invoice Details

Provides search on INVNUM in Nexus ECM

Figure 15: Interface to Nexus — Values from report for indexing

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Nexus Portal runs on the Apache HTTP server that comes for free with the iSeries. Therefore, you can run the Nexus portal with very little initial financial investment. Nexus is inexpensive to acquire, and there are no additional hardware or software requirements to run it. It runs very efficiently. Covenant Transport does $582 million in sales, and they have 728 users on a model 825. The company needed an easy way to search for documents related to customer shipments. They also wanted to be able to access a disparate range of applications with single sign-on capability. They wanted to access Web-based applications, iSeries applications, and so on. Before they implemented Nexus, users had asked the IT personnel either to find their applications or provide links for them to the applications. The cost differential between the major vendor and the Nexus offering was $250,000 versus $3,500. The cost for Covenant Transport for Nexus was simply the annual maintenance fee. For Covenant Transport, Nexus has improved the presentation of information, integrated disparate business applications, facilitated collaboration between workers within and between departments, and simplified publishing and distributing important business information. For a free trial, you can go to www.bcdsoftware.com for more information (Figure 18).

Create new data value

Hi-lite on report

Figure 17: Defining index data value

Figure 18: ECM (Enterprise Content Management)

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