Channel Surfing

Ready to hitch your data delivery wagon to XML?

Nelson King     

Extensible markup language (XML) is a specification. XML is a computer industry buzzword. XML is something a lot of vendors are issuing white papers about. You’ve probably heard of XML. How many products are actually using XML at an enterprise level? Not many; at least not yet. There are important exceptions, and DataChannel Server is one of them.

DataChannel Inc.’s DataChannel Server 4.0 (DCS, formerly called RIO server) is an enterprise software system that uses TCP/IP networks to manage information content and distribute it to people in an organization. If you’re an end user, using DCS means opening a Web browser or Windows client, going to a start page, and viewing the information in the corporation that you (or someone) has decided you need to see.

This information can be drawn from almost anywhere, but most especially from corporate databases — those legacy monsters so reluctant to deliver the data they’ve gobbled for years. By another name, this product is called an enterprise information portal (EIP). In the DataChannel system, it’s also a little bit of the old-style executive information system (EIS) with some drill-down capability, and an Internet-style “push” information system that notifies users of changes to pertinent information.

None of these functions is revolutionary, or even particularly unusual. Various approaches to delivering corporate information to users have been around for years — on and off the Internet. Lotus Notes certainly can provide many of the same features. Other products such as Brio Technology Brio and Verano Illuminar offer portal services through the Internet. What makes DataChannel interesting, important to watch, and a serious contender for a variety of intranet and extranet applications is the way it uses XML.

The X Factor

As a company, DataChannel has been involved with XML from the beginning, including participation in the original specification committees and other aspects of the XML scene. Every aspect of DCS is built with XML capabilities in mind. This covers not only the typical uses of XML to handle data conversion and formatting from database systems, but also the way in which the data is presented to the user. DCS is incorporating a technology that DataChannel calls XPages, a blend of XML for data definition, Document Object Model (DOM) for packaging the pages, and extensible stylesheet language (XSL) to format the data for presentation. Although the detail of this technology is interesting, its importance is that it provides a very direct way of creating applications with dynamic data. Rather than make application developers go through layers of middleware and user interface programming, XPages let them move more or less directly from data access to presentation. Because it’s done with XML, it’s also generic in approach and can be applied to almost any kind of data.

What DataChannel is doing may eventually be an alternative way to program data-driven applications — something different from, and in some ways better than — programming in HTML or even Java. From what I’ve seen, the technology of DCS is working quite well. Despite being new and probably unfamiliar, it is not difficult to implement. A sharp staff of two or three, working closely with DataChannel people, could bring up a prototype system in less than a month. However, as is often the case with enterprise applications, moving the system to full speed involves effort of a different order of magnitude.

The way DataChannel approaches the marketing of DCS implies that making it work is not a matter of tossing the basic server and software development kit to the resident propeller-heads and letting them bang away. Organizing enterprise data so that it can be meaningfully and safely presented to employees (or others) requires a lot more than the latest technology. It involves many policy decisions, and therefore should also involve somebody with the intelligence to fashion data into helpful and useful information.

For that reason, the starting price for a DCS installation is around $100,000 and includes preparation seminars, consultation, installation support, and user training. In short, you’re buying services as well as DataChannel Server, which is important with this kind of product.

Follow the Folders

Installing DataChannel Server should present no unusual difficulties on any of the supported systems (Windows NT and flavors of Unix). After the server is running, the most important part of working with DCS is configuring it: connecting it to data and other forms of content, organizing the content, and then creating the elements of the user interface. In all this activity, customization is the rule, not the exception. DCS uses a database (currently it supports Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server) to store its metadata (users, permissions, subscriptions, and so on). Typically you store content in a directory system on the DCS computers but may also store it in the DCS database or on remote FTP and HTTP servers.

FIGURE 1 The well-organized and easy-to-use start page is the home base for DCS users.

To organize the content, DCS typically uses the good old directory (folder) tree approach. This storage method may not be the most efficient (depending on the OS and the hardware) but its familiarity helps both those who provide the content and those who use it to find what they need. It’s interesting that an organizational approach almost 50 years old is still one of the most tractable.

FIGURE 2 DCS management is organized in the system administrator’s start page.

When it comes to displaying the information to the user with the enterprise information portal, the product holds some pleasant surprises. Many Web pages are a hodgepodge of data and visuals, even when they aren’t trying to be flashy, which often makes them extremely difficult to read. The DataChannel pages are easy to read, no mean achievement considering the amount of information they present. Using visual blocks, tabs, and other techniques, DCS keeps information in well-organized and consistent locations. Considerable thought and talent has gone into the design of the DCS user interface. The look is clean and puts your eyeballs on the content where they belong. I believe this can be rightly called a gestalt, a configuration that you can learn to read quickly because you know where and how to look at it. This attribute is essential to communicating a great deal of information as effectively as possible.

To locate information, DCS provides an implementation of the Excalibur Technologies search engine, which allows information retrieval based on natural language, idiom recognition, keywords, and query-by-example. A more sophisticated search capability would be difficult to find.

Although the end users have some control over the appearance of their own portal pages, the more interesting user-interface elements must be created by programmers (with or without DataChannel support). This is where the XPage technology may come into play. Certainly in the short run the skills to use XSL and DOM are in limited supply, although I believe that learning them in the DCS context will not stymie experienced programmers. DataChannel provides a complete SDK and XPage examples to build upon.

Collaborative Content Management

Content for DCS can be almost anything: word processing documents, Web pages, spreadsheets, or pictures, for example. Adding content is usually a simple three-step process, for which DCS provides a Content Wizard. There’s nothing difficult about the process, although I often wished there was a better way to add Web pages other than cutting and pasting a URL from the browser (or worse, trying to remember the URL).

FIGURE 3 The publish wizard helps users add content through a simple three-step process.

In most DCS systems, users play a big, if not exclusive, role in the development and publishing of content. There is an important interplay between users and administrators concerning the permissions (rights) users are given, the structure of the DCS folders, and the elements on the user interface (particularly the start page). Users can create folders, fill them with content, and (if they have the permission) grant permission to others to see them. The administrator provides other elements, usually as part of a company’s plan for structuring information. This is a complex arrangement, and it is a credit to the DCS design that it doesn’t seem difficult to accomplish.

While a certain amount of collaborative editing can be done with DCS content, this is not the same kind of workgroup environment that you find in Lotus Notes or Netscape Collabra, where most of the editing and updating is done within the Lotus or Collabra application itself. With DCS, the original application handles the editing — for example, it would run Microsoft Word to update a document. The orientation of DCS is more toward static presentation of information. For example, it provides WebView, its own implementation of a product called INSO Outside In Server (available for only the NT version). Web View can convert a wide variety of documents into HTML pages, a browser can open them, and they don’t need the original application (such as a word processor or spreadsheet program) to present them.

Sign Up for Push

You don’t hear the word “push” too often these days; it’s the Internet technology that automatically delivers pertinent information directly to each user’s computer. Perhaps the reality limiting push is just that users like to have some control over what they see, making some interactivity necessary — precisely what a DCS portal provides. In this case, many users may choose to subscribe to information of various topics, which is then published to them based on their selection of triggers such as additions, changes, deletions, or updates. DCS provides a place in the personalized portal to receive subscribed information, but more often, users will get the updates via email (also generated by DCS).

One of the most painstaking jobs in running any distributed information system is managing users. DCS can import users from NT domains and LDAP servers. This capability should mostly free the administrator from tedious manual updating.

The Ultimate Customization

There are so many ways to deliver information to a company’s employees (and perhaps business partners) that the difficulty will be to select the approach that not only fits the situation but also does it the most efficiently. In some situations, perhaps a great deal of collaboration is necessary. In others, perhaps the volume of data is extreme, as it might be for statistical analysis. DataChannel Server is not always the best solution. On the other hand, because of its sophisticated use of XML, DCS may be able to accomplish projects such as EDI or business-to-employee interactions more easily and effectively than any other approach.

So, in part, using DCS 4.0 means hitching a company’s data delivery wagon to XML. Considering the state of XML development so far, a company could hardly do better. The expertise gained from implementing DCS 4.0 could well be a major advantage for using XML in business-to-business applications as well as providing a remarkably efficient way to provide information for employees. DataChannel Server 4.0 is a solid, useful, and flexible product that should be high on a short list of products for those considering an EIP, or for that matter, any of several other kinds of data-driven applications.