Papers & Articles

Orchestra and Solo Architecture – Designed around Business for Managing Business Information

PointCross architected its Orchestra enterprise platform around these basic principles. It uses an ontology engine to provide for the:

• Creation and editing of business contexts to support the needs of any aspect of business
• Automation in the creation and maintenance of business contexts to support processes
• Linkage of business contexts to other business contexts based on the natural hierarchy and structure of the business at hand – functional, technical, processes, or projects.
• Linkages to contexts to their content store
  • Store the physical content in these stores, or
  • Provide links to external content stores if they are in a controlled repository
• Linkages from contexts to definitions (taxonomies)
• Linkages of contexts to elements in a role structure for that function, project, or process
• Linkage of roles to people in a universal identity system that can be tied to the company’s AD system
• Linkages of people to their experience and expertise
• Link contexts to business rules (to support processes, surveys, and compliance)
• Provide permission checking services to any application and internal services that require accessing business data
• Automation in the communications and transmittal of information within or outside the contextual network for business information. Contextual email from Orchestra is anchored in the contexts and instead of the sender writing directly to the recipient, the emails gets logged first in the context, threaded, and then relayed to the recipient. That email has become a pointer to the other content related to that email.
• Provide a range of services to users and other enterprise applications.
• Serve users directly
• Serve information to their portals
• Provide services to other applications with permission checks that include:
• Search for information
• Secure access, transfer, or audit
• Compliance related services
• Allow people to access all relevant information about any context with a single click
• Ensure security of information for remote workers who work off line and who need information when they are not on the network
• Automatic synchronization of all needed information based on context and relevance to current work
• Mirrored view of information on the local client data store that the business worker is used to when connected to the network.
• Ensuring that only what the user is permitted to have access to be permitted on the client (Solo).
• Ensure secure sharing of work in process and content among permitted team members while hiding content and work in process.
• Enable email communications with precise control on distribution – manually or based on business rules
• Provide ultra secure communications (not relying on SMTP) while communicating with internal or external parties during sensitive negotiations or for other business purposes.
  

Providing secure access to all allowable information, whether it is for work, or distributing information or searching is entirely based on the business roles and assignments and the real time changes that happen routinely.
By ensuring that, Orchestra makes enterprise search possible in a simple and powerful ways:
1. By combining, or grouping, all related information about a business context all search results automatically return the context and therefore provides the user with an immediate way to look at and inspect information that is related to the business context but not perhaps related explicitly to the search criterion. This makes it unnecessary to depend on concept search algorithms and other fancy, but less than perfect natural language parsing and analysis software.

2. Once the context is known and the permissions (need-to-know) for the user is established there is no more need to do any extra access checks. All current search engines (Google, Microsoft, Autonomy and others) depend on the AD Roles (which we have shown will not work in knowledge and project businesses). Or they depend on embedding the authorized users into the documents metadata. The latter being completely useless because every time people change jobs these files need to be updated and on top of it – valid search results will be ignored (false negatives) if new users are added to a project but all the possible documents have not yet been added to the document metadata list while removing people who have left. What’s more – this is precisely the situation one expects when a project shifts from one phase to the next and new people come on board. At the very moment that new people need access to information from the previous stage, they are most likely to be denied it.

3. Orchestra reduces the need to search through text content because if the context is found it usually results in finding everything they are likely to be looking for. And, finding contexts is simplified by the fast character search within Orchestra and Solo.

4. It is possible to invoke search automatically based on the current perspective of the user. Orchestra creates 360 degree awareness about the information around a context, and it immerses users into that environment.