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Technical Product Features |
Categoric's products are designed in a modular fashion to allow maximum interoperability with 3rd party systems/technologies. They provide the business process builder a wealth of simple to use functionality via a drag and drop interface. Complex processes to extract data, analyse it, report on it and then take automatic corrective action can be built in minutes. Features common to both Xalerts and Accord include:
Connectivity
- Databases - databases can be queried and updated.
Database connectivity is provided by JDBC. Examples of databases our
customers are connecting to our Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2,
MySQL, PostgreSQL. Using the product APIs it is also possible from
database triggers to initiate business processes. (more information on
database connectivity is provided in the "Database integration
technical note" in the downloads section).
- SAP - BAPIs and RFCs can be executed. Data can be queried
using our unique SAP Data browser that gives SAP users a familiar and
easy to use system of extracting data from SAP systems.
- HTTP/HTTPS - Websites can be queried and data extracted. Both
Xalerts and Accord can act as web servers serving up dynamic web content.
- FTP - Data can be extracted from and uploaded to ftp sites.
- Flat file - files and directory structures can be read in and
analysed. These can be from different systems such as the local file
system, Windows shares, Samba, WebDAV Servers. Contents of compressed
files can be easily extracted.
- Email - the most popular
method of communicating, business processes can be initiated by
incoming emails. Outgoing emails can easily have generated reports
attachment to them and can be easily encrypted with either PGP or
S/MIME.
- SMS - Our "out of the box" SMS service allows you to build a
business process and send it to an SMS device within seconds. No
signing up with 3rd party providers. Multiple response mechanisms are
also available to allow 2-way messaging.
- SNMP - Need to monitor devices on your network? Need to know
when a database goes down? SNMP messages can be monitored for and
generated.
- LDAP - Data such as user profiles, can be queried from LDAP stores and easily used as the recipient details for messages.
- JMS - Integration with message brokers such as Websphere MQ, allowing both the reading and writing of messages.
- 3rd party programs - A Java, COM and .Net API allows 3rd
programs to easily initiate business processes - passing through
instant specific data.
- Scripting engine - if a module is available to communicate
with the device you have - then a powerful scripting engine is
available to allow you to easily write your own, or our team of
developers can quickly develop you a custom module to you specific
requirements.
Event detection
- Business
processes can be either kicked off by some external event (e.g. a
database trigger or a HTTP request) - or external data can be polled
for changes.
- Our unique data filter module allows data to be easily
monitored for changes (or no changes) without having to use any
database triggers. It can detect new data being inserted or data being
change that can then be used as the event to initiate a business
process.
Data Transformation/Manipulation
- XSL - XML data can easily be transformed using the XSL module to apply a transformation
- DSV - Automate the turning of data in to a delimiter separated message (such as a CSV file) with a few clicks.
- Data encoding/decoding - encode/decode data using easy to use functions such as Base64 encode/decode.
- Cross data joining - using our unique data joining engine it
is possible to easily join data from multiple heterogeneous data
sources. For example, join users from an LDAP store with those in a
database table with those from a list of users on a page on a website.
No need to purchase separate 3rd party database join engines.
- Data filtering - our data filtering engine allows SQL like
WHERE expressions to filter data that could not traditionally be
filtered. For example, data can be grabbed from an HTML table and
filtered.
- Regular expression matching/replacing - search (and replace) data using powerful POSIX regular expressions.
Control of flow
- Branching - decision logic is easily built and the branch of modules to process be made dependant on the content of the data.
- Parallel processing - for maximum performance/throughput,
modules can be processed in parallel when the output of one isn't
dependant on another.
- Looping - Data can be looped through, analysed row at a time.
- Cascading - Sub processes can be spawned, either to run independently, or as a reusable piece of business logic.
- Synchronising - having branched/spawn child processes it
is possible to synchronise multiple branches of a business process back
up - merging data back together and allowing some final action to be
taken.
Reporting
- Recipients
of messages (both humans or other systems) can be fixed at process
build time or dynamic decided at run time with their details coming
from a data source such as Active Directory.
- Data can easily be formatted into a multitude of formatters
for reporting such as HTML files, Adobe PDFs, Excel spread sheets and
rich text format.
- Once formatted, data can be output to many devices/locations - emails,ftp sites, websites, SMS messages, message queues etc.
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