Collaboration Platform: The Flexible Foundation for Collaboration
True collaboration requires being open. To new ideas. To different approaches. To different cultures. Creating a collaboration environment that supports openness on a human level requires a technical foundation that supports openness on a software level.
Spaces by nGenera is built on just such an open, flexible yet solid foundation. One of the core aspects of Spaces by nGenera is the collaboration platform, an innovative piece of middleware that gives Spaces the ability to easily connect and share information and processes. The collaboration platform also ensures the security of your collaborations by instantly detecting infringing content – either inside or outside of the firewall, or that is attempting to cross the firewall. In addition, it provides a single place to manage collaboration policies and rules.
There are a variety of platform services within the collaboration platform. These allow external applications to access functionality through an application programming interface (API). APIs determine the vocabulary and calling conventions the programmer should employ to use their services. It may include specifications for routines, data structures, object classes, and protocols used to communicate between the consumer and implementer of the API.
Following is a list of the platform services contained within the collaboration platform:
User Service
Provides federated identity services within the collaboration platform, single sign-on and sign-out, shared user profiles across consumers and Active Directory/LDAP user authentication.
Provision Service
Provides applications and other services with unique identifiers within the collaboration platform, as well as a list of other available services. All consumers should bootstrap by calling the Provision Service. The bootstrap sequence identifies and connects consumers within the collaboration platform. After bootstrap, no further contact with the Provision Service is required.
Content Service
Masters content that lives in nGenera applications, along with the access control lists (ACLs) necessary to securely serve data.
Organization Service
Provides the following data to applications and other services: organizations (or interest groups), shared group profiles across consumers, relations between any platform entity, and relation searching/graphing capabilities.
Search Service
Provides RESTful query support to the nGenera content repository, including filter/sort capabilities. It also provides an API for generating "related terms" for filtered content sets.
Listener Service
Provides global search capability on specified social media channels, as well as trend analysis, identification of significant patterns, and a sentiment engine to determine the level of confidence in whether an item has positive or negative sentiment.
Storage Service
Provides check-in/check-out service, as well as the ability to add files to the storage repository (upload) and retrieve them again (download). The storage service also provides versioning – the ability to track changes in items and "roll back" to a previous item; and repository browsing, which delivers a representative view of items in the repository (to the extent allowed by security restrictions).
Activity Service
Provides sophisticated activity tracking and filtering tools. Defines a complex activity grammar, which separates nouns and verbs from template text, and uses that information to apply security, offer robust filtering, and define click-throughs.
PubSub Service
Provides the following to applications and other services: Destinations – two types of destinations, queues and topics, with which to publish messages to; Destination Listeners – the ability to define listeners that will post back to specified URLs; and Message Browsing – the ability to get a representative view of unprocessed messages on a destination.