Other Ensemble Options
This chapter provides an overview of other options within Ensemble. It is intended to alert you to features that you may want to include in your Ensemble productions. This chapter discusses the following topics:
User Portal
The User Portal (formally called the DeepSee User Portal) is intended for direct use by end users, in contrast to such back end tools as Studio and the Management Portal. This portal is intended for general use and has a general appearance, despite its specific name. It is not labeled with “DeepSee.” The following shows an example:
The User Portal is designed to enable end users to do the following tasks:
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View and dashboards, which can include Ensemble business metrics, introduced later in this chapter.
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View and manage workflow tasks, introduced in the next section.
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Send messages to other users of the User Portal, as seen in the upper left corner of the previous figure.
For details, see the DeepSee User Guide.
Workflow
Ensemble provides support for workflow. Workflow makes it possible to incorporate human interaction into automated business processes. Uses of workflow within the enterprise might include order entry, order fulfillment, contract approval, or help desk activities.
An Ensemble production achieves workflow using a business process and set of business operations. A business process receives a request, organizes the tasks required to fulfill that request, and then calls upon business operations to perform these tasks.
Each of these business operations assigns the task to a workflow role, which places the task into the workflow inbox of each Ensemble user who belongs to that role. To access this inbox, users work with the User Portal, introduced in the previous topic.
When a user marks as a task as complete, the workflow engine continues with the next processing step.
For details, see Defining Workflows.
Business Activity Monitoring
Ensemble includes all the elements required to include business activity monitoring (BAM) as part of an enterprise integration project.
First, it provides business metrics, which are specialized business service classes that calculate specific values at a configurable time interval. These calculations can take a variety of forms, involving calls to business operations, federated databases, the Ensemble database, or any arbitrary source code contained within the business metric class. See “Defining Business Metrics” in Developing Ensemble Productions.
Second, it provides dashboards, which are web pages that provide a real-time, graphical display of metric values. Each dashboard presents one or more meters, and these display business metrics. Ensemble provides a complete set of built-in meters that includes speedometers, light bars, traffic lights, and others.
The following shows an example dashboard that displays business metrics:
To getting started with dashboards, see “Creating Dashboards” in Configuring Ensemble Productions. For complete information, see Creating DeepSee Dashboards.
Alerts
An alert sends notifications to applicable users while an Ensemble production is running, in the event that an alert event occurs. The intention is to alert a system administrator or service technician to the presence of a problem. Alerts may be delivered via email, text pager, or another mechanism. For details, see “Programming in Ensemble” in Developing Ensemble Productions.
Publish and Subscribe Message Delivery
Ensemble also supports publish and subscribe message routing. This technique routes a message to one or more subscribers based on the fact that those subscribers have previously registered to be notified about messages on a specific topic. For details, see Managing Ensemble.
Message Bank
The Enterprise Message Bank is an optional remote archiving facility where you can collect messages, Event Log items, and search table entries from multiple Ensemble client productions. It consists of the following components:
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The Message Bank server, which is a simple Ensemble production consisting exclusively of a Message Bank service that receives submissions from any number of client productions.
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A client operation (the Message Bank operation) that you add to an Ensemble production and configure with the address of a Message Bank server.
To get started, see “Defining an Enterprise Message Bank” in Developing Ensemble Productions.