This section provides the technical details and know-how required to work with GSi. This section details the environment, administration, configuration and usage from the technical perspective.

 

Standards

 

The solution is completely based on Open Standards. The process modeling language is based on XML Process Definition Language (XPDL) by Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC).

 

The technology standards are based on the industry widely accepted enterprise platform, Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE). The solution is platform neural and supports most of the current platforms.

 

The solution runs on middle-ware suite from different vendors like IBM (WebSphere), Sun (Java Enterprise), JBoss (Middleware). The solution supports various commonly used commercial and open source databases like Oracle, IBM DB2, MySQL, so on

 

Environment

 

The core and GSi server runs on a J2EE compliant application server and RDBMS database as the back-end. Most of the commercial and open source application servers run on widely variety of platforms. Apart from the application server, a mail server like James Mail Server / Microsoft Exchange is used for notification by E-mail.

 

The toolset provides tools which run in stand-alone mode or in a web browser. The administrator tool runs in a Web browser. The stand-alone tools run on Java 1.4.x + Virtual machine provided by Sun, IBM.

 

Vertical

 

A vertical is one logical set of processes running on GSi like SWD, FCS, RDS. A vertical has its own user profile information and its specific data structures for operation. The business processes defined and its execution state in terms of process and activity instances for a vertical resides within GSi repository. Based on where the user profile information is stored and managed, the vertical is classified into one of the below vertical type.

 

 

Managed vertical

The User Profile (Users, Roles and Groups) is managed within GSi and physical exists in GSi repository. The vertical users are managed (add, modify, delete) thru the GSi Administrator interface. The Vertical access the user profile information thru the GSi Vertical Client API for authentication and authorization.

The figure below shows the working of a managed vertical.

 

 

Unmanaged vertical

The User Profile is managed by the vertical itself. The user profile information resides in the vertical repository. GSi refers to the vertical user profile for role resolution and other purposes. This is achieved through specific interfaces that need to be implemented by vertical and made available to GSi.

 

The figure below shows the working of a managed vertical.

 

 

Task Management

 

A user task (manual activity) is a task performed by user of the vertical. Who performs a task (performer), is specified while process modeling using the GSi Modeler tool. The performer can be a specific user, users of a specific role and /or users of a specific department/business group. While specifying the user task, the business analyst can select the task allocation algorithm to use for task management.

 

The user tasks are managed by the infrastructure. This includes role resolution, and assignment of tasks to users, roles and/or groups/departments.

 

The infrastructure has a powerful and flexible mechanism in place to handle user tasks. This feature supports dynamic task allocation algorithms through a plug-in mechanism.

 

As part of the infrastructure, the following three task allocation algorithms are provided.

• Default
• In this mode the task is not assigned to a user, instead it is made available to the potential role and/or department as defined in the process definition. The users of the role/department are provided with an option to claim the task. Once the task is claimed by a user, it is not available for other user to access.

 

• Random
• In this mode, the task is randomly assigned to a user of the potential role and/or department specified in the process definition.
• Least Loaded
• In this mode, the task is assigned to a user of the potential role and/or department specified in the process definition who is least loaded with tasks.

 

New algorithms based on need, can be easily developed by implementing a simple interface provided and deployed to the infrastructure. Once this is done, the algorithm is available to the modeler tool for selection and to the infrastructure for task management.

 

Administration

 

GSi provides an administrator interface using which GSi can be administered. The interface is a browser based one and can be accessed from local and remote locations.

 

The GSi core and other necessary configuration are stored as XML documents in the repository. The configuration can be updated to alter the configurable entities.