Any Record, Any Where, Any Time: OSLC-enabled Applications System Development
Channel: Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration
Date: 2012-06-26

To better enable its Technical Support Engineers, provide better service for clients, and simplify the maintenance, management, and enhancement of its Client Request System, IBM Rational has made use of its own products and OSLC-based integrations.

We have deployed a set of five OSLC-enabled applications, created independently by business specialists from different divisions within our company. Each application was independently vetted in a production environment by hundreds of engineers around the world using them on a 24 hour X 7 day basis for more than a year. Each application has its own security facilitated by Single Sign-On technology.

Some benefits and outcomes:

+ Application context switching is minimized by mouse hover and UI preview of OSLC linked records
+ This loosely-coupled system replaces a tightly-coupled, synchronization-replicating application whose design required interdisciplinary business knowledge and code needing many conditions
+ Synchronization-replication of data across applications has been minimized; duplication has been reduced to only the data that does not change and needs real-time reporting
+ Records are extracted from various application databases and transformed into standard format; once loaded into a Data Warehouse, OSLC-linked records are reported as though they are one record
+ An index database created from the Data Warehouse provides system-wide, string-based text searching