# Presentation: 610306

## Next Generation of Collaboration and Sharing Capabilities for GSFC

**Johnny Medina - R&D in Collaborative Tools / Engineering since 1996 **
**Christopher (Chris) Holtery- R&D, Operations for VSDE since 2002**

**Template Design by PoweredTemplates.com**

## Collaborative Technologies

*“**Tools & Capabilities that enable sharing information and knowledge among a community”*
- NASA and GSFC have been riding the evolutionary wave which has helped us get here today

## Evolution

## Computing Environments and Collaborative Technologies Branch

***Architecture and Applications***
**Creation of an ecosystem**
- Suite of tools and capabilities for off-the-shelf use, modification or customization

**Notes:**
Creating an ecosystem
Various portal/portlet views into the content (pm, engineer, admin, finance) allow personalization of the tools

## Requirements: for Today and the Future 

**Cost**
- Reuse & Rapid prototyping
- Broad applicability
- Targeted solutions
**Processes**
- Business Process cycle time improvements
- Seamlessly adapt and evolve with changing processes
**Security**
- Authentication
- Authorization
- Single Sign On

## The Path Forward

- VSDE: The Need for Change
- Portal Technologies
- VSDE to V3
- V3
**Solutions**
**Challenges**
**Implementation Schedule**
- VSDE Maintenance and Retirement
- Collaborative Technology Moments

## VSDE: The Need for Change 

**Notes:**
Intentionally blank.

The initial part of this presentation provided a view into where we’ve been and where we’re going.
Long before that evolution was initiated, the need to enhance VSDE and position the architecture for growth was well understood.
Without going into a list of specifics, and to break up a deck of textual slides,... Equestrians, forgive me

## VSDE: The Need for Change 

**Notes:**
VSDE, ain’t she a beauty.  Secure file sharing, action items, calendars, announcements, ----- 

However, not everyone has that view,..

## Slide 9

**Notes:**
VSDE – showing her age.  Getting the job done, but not so good with the flashy new stuff

Still others,...

## Slide 10

**Notes:**
VSDE – no search? No version control?  “it’s dead to me!”

And lastly,...

## Slide 11

**Notes:**
Take VSDE in a direction that is totally unexpected – utilizing its capabilities unique to their environment and information needs.

“how are you doing that?”

When all is said and done – the perception of VSDEs capabilities is as unique as each user/group and their specific needs for managing their information

## Information (is Power?)

- “Information is Power?  No.
- ... but
- Organized information is strength.
- Accurate information is essential.
- Up-to-date, new information is valuable.
- Communication is vital.
- Ongoing communication is organization.
- Intentional communication is strategic.
- Expanding communication is growth.
- Many-to-many communication is vibrant.
- Therefore ...
- Intentional, ongoing, expansive, many-to-many communication within the context of organized accurate, up-to-date information is power.”

**Copyright 1999 Steven Clift **

**Bring on the Portals!**

**Notes:**
I’ll take a moment to reflect on Information.  This quote is from a 1999 conference presentation by Steven Clift.  He was promoting his vision of a Minnesota Public Internet,... 

Possible reference-Google’s relentless march to gather information

## Portal Technology

- An initial goal of portal technology was to aggregate information from many resources. In many cases, this goal has been met.

- As a result, an individual can finds themselves with a diverse breadth of portal affiliations.

## NASA Portals

- Our affiliations and interaction with Portals is also witnessed by the prevalence of portals within the Agency.

**Notes:**
VSDE
ICE
Sharepoint(s)
NASA HomePage

## Collaborative Technologies

- Today’s collaborative technologies are providing the ability to aggregate information from among the portal landscape
- These technologies have the potential to mitigate the growing population of portal interactions
- “My Digital Life” – technologies in use today are creating a workforce generation “digitally connected at birth”

- Providing users a breadth of means to engage information and people is an enterprise necessity.

- Early adopters and next generation engineers are driving the migration from stovepipe applications and tools to collaborative technologies.

**Notes:**
Focusing on the engagement of collaborative technologies through the use of Portals and evolving social computing applications

## VSDE to V3

**Open Source Solutions**
- Lowest cost of ownership possible
**Enterprise Class Architectures and Applications**
- Security
- Reliability
**Innovative uses of tools and content**
- Reuse, rapid development, targeted solutions
**Consumerization of Applications**
- Give consideration to the social computing landscape and its impact on the enterprise application space

**Notes:**
We’ve been capturing Ideas, suggestions and complaints of the existing VSDE architecture and matching them with the exciting technologies that are in use and rapidly evolving.

## V3 Solutions 

**Portal Architecture: Liferay**
**Content Management: Alfresco**
**Issues/Actions Management: JIRA**
***And Others,...***

## Portal: Liferay 

- Created in 2000, the world's leading open source enterprise portal solution
- Runs on all major app servers & servlet containers, databases, and operating systems (over 700 deployment combinations)
- Uses the latest in Java, J2EE, and Web 2.0 technologies
- JSR-168 compliant (Java portlet specification that enables interoperability for portlets between different web portals.)

**Notes:**
Portlets are pluggable user interface components that are managed and displayed in a web portal. 
Personalized portlet distribution and selection.

## Liferay: User Interface

- Simple, clean interface with dynamic portlets.
- Over 60 portlets out-of-the-box

**Notes:**
Look will change to V3/NASA logo and color schemes

Maximize use of real estate : calendar use/ full screen

## V3 Solutions 

**Portal Architecture: Liferay**
**Content Management: Alfresco**
**Issues/Actions Management: JIRA**
***And Others,...***

## Content Management: Alfresco

- Founded in 2005, Alfresco is the leading open source alternative for enterprise content management.
- A system for organizing and facilitating collaborative creation of documents and other content.
- Multiple content access methods: Web client, FTP, WebDAV, CIFS (mapped network drive)
- Based on standards such as JSR-170 (Java specification for accessing content repositories in a uniform manner.), JSR-168, Web Services and REST

**Notes:**
REST: a collection of network architecture principles that outline how resources are defined and addressed. 

It couples the innovation of open source with the stability of a true enterprise-class platform. The open source model allows Alfresco to use best-of-breed open source technologies and contributions from the open source community to get higher quality software produced more quickly at much lower cost.
Open – Open Source, Open Standards 
Source – Best-of-Breed Open Source Components 
Enterprise – Enterprise-Scale, Enterprise-Infrastructure, Enterprise-Control 
Content – Documents, records, Web Pages, Images, Rich Media 
Management – Most Experienced Team in Content Management in the World from Documentum and Interwoven 

## Content Management: Alfresco 

**Image courtesy of Alfresco**** **

- Control, storage and use of records occurring in the normal course of business with the ability to demonstrate that the records accurately reflected a particular state in time.

- Capture, search and collaborate on documents with full library services and lifecycle management on a unified, robust repository.

- Enables organizations to transform from manual, paper-based handling to efficient business process driven, electronic access.

- A single web content repository for use by a complete team: content contributors, content managers, application developers and web designers.

## The Basics
Spaces and Content
Permissions
Searching/ OpenSearch- Federated Searches
Automating Tasks
Rules and Actions

- Spaces and Content
- Permissions
- Searching/ OpenSearch- Federated Searches
- Automating Tasks
- Rules and Actions

**Content Management: Alfresco**

- Collaboration
- Versioning
- Check in/out
- Forums and Discussions
- Work Flows
- Simple Flows Present
- Complex Flow Integration

**At A Glance**

- Email Addressable Spaces and Team Email Capture
- MSOffice Suite Integration
- Integrated Presence and Instant Messaging

**Notes:**
Alfresco is a modern state-of-the-art ECM built using Spring, Hibernate, Lucene and jBPM based on standards such JSR-170, JSR-168, Web Services and REST. This allows Alfresco to be deployed in any J2SE 5.0 (JRE 5.0) application server such as Apache Tomcat or JBoss Application Server delivering significantly better scalability and high-availability properties such as distributed cache management, automatic failover and clustering. 
Architecture
Full Service Oriented Architecture using Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, MyFaces, JSR 168, JSR 170 and JSE5 
High Availability – Distributed content synchronization, Failover Manager 
Clustering – Fully Distributed Cache 
Zero Footprint Client 
Benchmark Certification – 10 million document repository testing 
White Paper Available - The First Open Source JSR-170 Benchmark 
Administration 
Simple Installation 
Security and User Management with Users, Groups and Roles 
Document Level Security 
Upgrade and Migration Administration - Zero-Time Upgrade for Development Extensions 
Single Sign-On through NTLM or LDAP 
Standards Support 
Web Services, JSR 168, JSR 170 Level 2, MyFaces, WebDAV, DeltaV, SQL, RSS, ODF, OpenSearch 
Repository Customization 
REST architecture - URL Access to all Actions 
Server Customization – JavaScript Actions 
One Customization Model for Linux and Microsoft Windows 
Library Services 
Check-In/Out - Minor and Major Version Control 
Auditing – Who Created, Who Updated, When Created, When Updated 
Service Oriented Auditing – Audit every service invocation 
Document Cross Linking – Across multiple spaces 
Data Management and Transformation Engine 
Transformation – e.g. Word to PDF, PowerPoint to Flash 
Content Streaming 
Extensible Server-Based Transformation Engine 
Integrated Workflow 
jBPM Integration – Complex workflow support with JavaScript integration 
Compliance - Secure Document Lifecycle Management 
Content Categorization 
Automatic Meta-Data Extraction from all Interfaces 
Auto Categorization 
Advanced Search 
Combined Meta-Data, Content, Location, Object Type and Multi-Category Search 
Saved Searches 
Benefits 
The Alfresco JSR-170 repository offers significant benefits in terms of: 
Cost – Dramatically lower Total Cost of Ownership than legacy ECM systems 
Performance – Dramatically better performance than legacy ECM systems 
Rapid Deployment – Simple to Install, Rollout and Use

## Alfresco Web Client

**Notes:**
Navigation
Toolbar
Breadcrumb
Shelf
Header
Detail

## Alfresco within Liferay

- The content can also be accessed through Web Services as embedded portlets in the Liferay (or other) Portal.

## V3 Solutions 

**Portal Architecture: Liferay**
**Content Management: Alfresco**
**Issues/Actions Management: JIRA**
***And Others,...***

## Issues/Actions Management: JIRA 

- Initially discovered as we were searching for a replacement to the Action Item tool in VSDE, JIRA is a bug tracking, issue tracking, and project management application.
- Not open source, but minimal fee and full source code access allows for broad customization and integration.

**Notes:**
During Initial research into a replacement for our Action Item tool, we discovered JIRA
JIRA is a bug tracking, issue tracking, and project management application.
Features 
Manage bugs, features, tasks, improvements or any issue 
A clean and powerful user interface that is easy to understand for both business and technical users 
Map your business processes to custom workflows 
Track attachments, changes, components and versions 
Full text searching and powerful filtering (customisable, saveable, shareable and subscribeable!) 
Customisable dashboards and real-time statistics 
Enterprise permissioning and security 
Easily extended to and integrated with other systems (including email, RSS, Excel, XML and source control) 
Highly configurable notification options 
Runs on almost any hardware, OS and database platform 
Web service enabled for programmatic control (SOAP, XML-RPC and REST interfaces)

## JIRA: A Quick View

- Portlet style presentation and manipulation of information.
- Ability to address the JIRA content for inclusion in a Liferay portlet
- Build relationships of actions and issues directly to Alfresco content.

## V3 Solutions 

**Portal Architecture: Liferay**
**Content Management: Alfresco**
**Issues/Actions Management: JIRA**
***And Others,...***

## And More,...

***Blogging***
***Wikis***
***RSS***
***Bulletin Boards***

## V3 Challenges

***The Enterprise Internet versus the World Wide Internet***
- Security and access to repositories
- Identity management
***Workforce/Community expectations***
- Who owns the data experience?
- Can there be too much flexibility?
- Are favorite consumer sharing/collaborating sites acceptable?
***Form factors: What level of support and when?***
*Mobile phones*
*PDAs*

**Notes:**

User Experience: Controlled or Not?
User population and segmentation
	Contractor/civil servant, Roles: admin, financial, - responsibilities
Portal versus access to content (Ex: entire portal versus file sharing)
Coordination of information, applications, processes, people

## V3 Implementation Schedule 

## VSDE Maintenance and Retirement

**Define current groups desires:**
- In early 2008, existing groups will be contacted to plan for data migration to V3
- The duration of VSDE maintenance and support will be defined as groups identify their migration timelines
**Application Decommissioning**
- Following the completion of group migrations, the existing VSDE application will be decommissioned.

## Collaborative Technology Moments 

***Education***
- New tools, new challenges
***Developer Working Groups/Tool Kits***
- Best Practices
- Defined page layouts and templates
- Defined Portlet integration standards
- Integration code and standards for applications and middleware
***Community Conferences***
*Internal GSFC Communities*
*Industry Partner Communities*

***Creating opportunities to share our growth and engage the Goddard and Industry Communities***

**Notes:**
February developer work group discussing architecture and technical engagement of the environment

## Johnny.E.Medina@nasa.gov  301-286-3066

**Johnny.E.Medina@nasa.gov  301-286-3066**
**Christopher.M.Holtery@nasa.gov  301-286-4455**

**Notes:**
As the introduction and implementation of V3 progresses, we hope to see V3 become a community of groups using the power of their desired components to achieve success in their pursuits.

Time allowances:
Demonstrate Liferay – our development instance
Demonstrate Alfresco – their community site