Ability to easily track documents across different physical machines and networks

In a typical distributed integration, documents are passed in some sequence between applications on different machines. Each application typically processes the input document(s) to produce one or more modified output document(s), which need to be tracked for effective business process management.

Current process-driven SOA suites to not allow changes to documents at the end-points of the network to be easily tracked. The document-tracking facilities offered by such suites allow a document to be tracked within the process-server itself, and not across the already deployed applications which are being integrated; further, this support is not extended to track the flow of documents within external applications that are hooked into the process-server. The centralized "control flow" engines of existing process-serversuites provide no in-built support to track distributed flows of data across the network, making document tracking as described above difficult to implement without significant manual programming within the end-point applications themselves, increasing the complexity of the implementation.

Fiorano's distributed message-driven SOA architecture incorporates in-built document tracking across heterogeneous networks. By simply 'tagging' the input and/or output ports of a Service within a Fiorano application it becomes possible to track all document instances traversing that port. As documents enter a tagged input port (or leave a tagged output port), they are automatically published onto the Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus™ network asynchronously; all published documents are collected by default into a centralized relational database configured by the administrator. The Fiorano platform also provides options to the end-user collect published documents on-demand by tapping into the relevant transport.

The figure below shows a sample integration with document tracking enabled.

Click image for a larger view

In the above figure, document tracking has been turned on for the CRM, ERP and Rejected Orders Services as evidenced by the read tags on their input and output ports. Each instance of the document is tracked as follows:

• when orders exit the CRM system on machine 1
• when orders enter or leave the ERP system on machine 2
• when orders enter or leave the REJECTED ORDERS Service on machine 3

Thus, the documents are easily tracked across different machines in a heterogeneous network. To turn off document tracking, one can simply stop a Service (while others keep running, with no loss of data) and turn the 'document tracking' tags off.

Viewing Tracked documents. Documents tracked within any application can be viewed using the web-based Fiorano platform dashboard. This browser-based tool connects to the Fiorano Enterprise Server which hosts (by default) the relational database in which all tracked documents are stored. Alternatively, the administrator can configure other data stores across the network for document tracking.