Product Overview

Although we would be putting up more “informal” kind of blogs here, which are focused more on individual topics and shorter in length, one can always find more detailed information on the official site at Ascentn.com.

So here is a more concise introductions of the product line in the AgilePoint suite…let’s start from a business user’s perspective.

Typically he would “Envision” and built a process model, deploy it to the “Server” and that’s it, it is up and running can be used in production. The IT admin may have already configure the user base or can do it very easily using “Enterprise Manager”; IT developers can also built and add more AgileShapes using the “Developer”.

See, how easy it’s to create a process and deploy it, just a couple of sentences :-) well, believe me it’s as easy as this when it comes to actual use of the product and even easier to implement and absorb the changes in production.

Let’s run through with an introduction to each of them below…

AgilePoint Envision

It is a Visio based modeling tool, which allows the business user to create process flows using AgilePoint shapes; the process can be executed as is once it is deployed on the AgilePoint Server.

Following are some of the highlights about Envision

• AgilePoint shapes are similar to Visio shapes and can be very easily dragged from the stencils that are provided out of the box with Envision. They can be categorized into AgileParts & AgileWorks. Around 100+ are provided out of the box and more can be built using AgilePoint Developer.
• It provides support for simulation of the processes.
• The created processes can be very well integrated and used in the SharePoint deployment as well.
• It can deploy the process to various environments like development, testing & production making the manageability easier for the user.
• It uses integrated security and provides versioning which comes very handy in larger deployments when the number and versions of process start increasing.
• The processes that are created are highly flexible when it comes to providing or consuming data to or from other components in the enterprise play, for e.g. web services, SharePoint deployments, FTP\file servers, BizTalk, Databases etc.
• Like the individual AgileShapes, the processes can also be reused and can consume or in turn be consumed by other processes thus allowing process composition to be very easy. The information can be shared between the parent process and sub-process.

AgilePoint Server

Like any other system, the Server is the heart of AgilePoint and controls the whole system, it is an ASP.Net application. following are some of the highlights of the server

• The process model deployed from Envision are published to the server and made available for consumption.
• All the information flows in form of XML which makes it very easy to change a process model definition on the fly without effecting the running instances. 
• The server can be integrated with Active Directory and can reuse the existing user base. The users can be further categorized into Groups\Roles and be given the appropriate access rights.
• The server is highly scalable and can be easily installed over a Network Load Balancing environment.
• The server provides the web services APIs for handling the Admin and the Workflow tasks which makes it very easy for virtually any client to interact with the server. In other words both the .Net as well as J2EE clients or any other framework understanding web services can communicate and interact with the server flawlessly.
• This also makes it very easy to use any forms technology with the process.
• The server uses caching at the various layers and has process hydration\dehydration up to an activity level which helps is using the memory and other resources very efficiently.

AgilePoint Enterprise Manager

Enterprise Manager forms the central dashboard to control and manage or monitor the various processes running in the system or for a particular implementation.

Following are some of the highlights of this wonderful tool

• It’s a web based tool.
• Helps in managing the operational activities like versioning, backups\restores, import\export etc for the various process models.
• Allows monitoring the running instances, migrating them to the newer versions if required, dynamic rollbacks, partial rerun, workload balancing on the fly etc. Important point is all this happens without restarting the server.
• Allows user management, synchronization with the Active Directory\SharePoint,  delegation of tasks etc.
• Performance monitoring and error reporting so that proper action can be taken on issues demanding immediate attention.
• Easy deployment across various environments.
• One can try a particular task on a single instance of a process model for e.g. say while migrating from one version to another. Once the user is satisfied, scripts can be generated so that they can be applied to all the running instances.

AgilePoint Developer

Although after installing Envision there are 100 AgileShapes that are installed along with it but still there might be a need for developing or extending the AgileShapes either to create a customized component or to enhance an existing functionality.

Like Envision Developer it is based on another Microsoft Product, Visual Studio so that the existing expertise can be leveraged here as well. Following are some of the highlights

• AgileShapes can be divided into two types, AgileWork and AgilePart.
• AgileWork is focused towards human interaction and comes into play wherever a human participation is possible.
• AgilePart on the other hand is more focused on integration kind of scenarios, situation where the process needs some information from other system.
• A third type of component called AgileConnector can also be built using the developer. It is used in a more generic sense and can be said of being implemented at the server level. This makes it reusable across more than one process models.

To summarize, we looked into how the various components of the suite help build the solution from different aspects keeping in mind the expertise of the various users involved. The result is that each user does what he is an expertise in and in the process the ROI is improved to a great extend.

The bullet points mentioned for each component is in no way a complete feature list and may be compared to the tip of an iceberg. More detailed information can be found at Ascentn.com. Also later in this blog itself we’ll put up detailed examples and articles addressing each of them explicitly.

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