Today’s business processes in the publishing industry are characterized by the fact that different systems and subsystems are used to carry out important tasks in the data and/or workflows. The increasing number of systems involved and interfaces required, is largely due to internal company functions being partially replaced by customer oriented functions based on web technology (e.g. customer self care and ordering) and to the fact that business processes are divided up between multiple systems.

Previously it was sufficient to implement the necessary communication streams with file based, asynchronous and only "once-a-day" interface solutions. This kind of technology is, however, often too complex to handle without difficulties regarding the defined business processes. The various data structure requirements and special formats required by the systems involved are mainly responsible for these difficulties. Especially when nearly identical information has to be distributed (e.g. for products) to different systems, each with their own interface formats, the degree of variance between previously similar interfaces simply explodes.

Furthermore it has become more essential to inform and to be informed by other systems about data creation and modification in "real-time". This cannot be achieved by direct access to the Klopotek data using the web services that are already available. Web services retrieve information about modified data, if requested, but are not event driven, in that they do not actively push relevant modified information. Shortening the time intervals between the standard import and export processes would simply increase the volume of database activity, which in turn would probably disturb the user at work. Another problem are the usually "fixed" data exchange chains, which cannot be adapted easily to accommodate the ever changing business processes.

Klopotek has developed a flexible interface framework based on the idea of active communication between multiple systems to deal with the abovementioned issues. The approach is described as a "Message-Based Services (MBS)", based on Java, as well as Klopotek Standard web services and is an enhancement of the existing standard interface technology.

The "Message Based Services (MBS)" technology is based on an XML data structure as the format exchange standard. The adoption of XML (Extended Markup Language) in combination with easy-to-use validation and transformation functionality is, in view of the existing format diversity, the most effective way to let systems "speak" to each other and to exchange data in a structured and well-documented manner. The information units used for communicating with other systems are known as Business Data Messages.

As sending and receiving modified data in real-time is the main task of message based services, this
approach provides a much more intelligent trigger and process mechanism for data modification than can currently be supported by existing file based standard interface technology. Nevertheless, interconnecting several systems creates the need for a vast number of different interfaces or interface structures. To simplify the increasing complexity, the entire technological scenario can be complemented by specific middleware components like the ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) from SONIC or the XI Environment (Exchange Infrastructure) from SAP. These components support the data-driven definition of business processes as well as the mapping process from one interface to another. They allow the definition of pre-configured services that track and control the entire dataflow between multiple applications. The main advantage is that a customer specific "staging area" for business data can be built up without any system overhead. The data stored is easy to identify and accessible for many systems via the defined connection utilities.

Instead of implementing sophisticated middleware components to support a centralized approach to intercompany communication, message based services also support the "normal" queuing functionality already provided by many database systems. A queue holds received data until it is processed by the different consumers and is seen to be a more a technical solution used to decrease the number of existing file based interfaces.

Message-based services do not provide the same functionality as the middleware components mentioned, but they do allow an easy way of connecting the web services and thus the data maintained in the Klopotek system to such software systems.


Message Based Service - Product Information 9.5 [PDF, 80KB]