McLaren Enterprise Engineer Reprographics Server

McLaren Enterprise Engineer Repographics server polls a job source continually for work items.

It provides following features:

• ·        Watermarking
• ·        Moving files
• ·        Rendering to PDF/HTML/Tiff formats
• ·        Content transfer to the transmittal server
• ·        Properties update
• ·        Title Block Synchronization

Technical details:

• ·         It polls a specific inbox and finds tasks. It processes task based on the configuration information.
• ·         It runs on .Net framework 3.5
• ·         It is used as wither Windows service or a standalone GUI.(Administrator account is needed when installing Reprographics as a Windows service)
• ·         It is built on top of McLaren Work Manager

Hardware/Software detail

• ·         McLaren Work Manager Client (With Office integration and Drawing Manager)
• ·         MS IIS 7.0
• ·         Native apps like CAD, Adobe Acrobat Professional and MS Office (for rendering purpose)
• ·         One repro server needs one reprographics user account.
• ·         Reprographics specific entries are present in the computer registry as following location: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mclaren\
• ·         Reprographics console is accessed by visiting URL http:///ReproAdmin
• ·         Reprographics server uses log4Net to create and maintain logs and controlled by ReprographicsController.exe.config file available at c:\Program Files\Mclaren\Reprographics\. The log file is located in the user’s profile at c:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Mclaren\EnterpriseEngineer\logs

Important Configuration Files

JobSources.xml

This configuration file tells the server which inbox to poll for tasks.

TaskPerformers.xml

This configuration file contains settings that guides transformation of native file into various different formats viz. PDF/XML/HTML etc.

Servers.xml

This configuration file tells Repro about the ECM servers [Repository (for Documentum)/ Content Server (for FileNet)] to connect to and provides connection information (configured via Reprographics Connection window).

Preferences

As Webtop in Documentum and Workplace/Workplace XT in FileNet P8 allow users to have set their profile preferences, Reprographics has following types of preferences:

a). General

This type of preferences include polling interval, the default timeout, daily boot time etc.

b). Email Notifications

Sends email notifications to administrator when job fails to complete.

This tab needs SMTP server information to be configured and email account of an administrator who needs to be notified via an email.

How Reprographics Works?

Step1: It finds a Work Task

Step2: Uses configuration information to determine necessary processes (Uses Parameter Gatherers)

Step3: Selects Task Performer* based on Parameter Gatherer information.

* = A component that executes the task usually defined in TaskPerformers.xml

Task Performers render the native files such as CAD into PDF and also performs non-rendering tasks such as change of lifecycle states of documents.

Multiple servers process same queue

Multiple Reprographics servers can poll the same inbox queue. If one server goes down the other will process all tasks. Multiple servers help to handle high volume of tasks. Reprographics server picks the task in FIFO fashion.

Multiple servers process different queues

In multiple Reprographics servers’ scenario (require multiple licenses), each server can poll a different inbox queue as well. JobSources.xml needs to be modified for queue (inbox) information. Specific tasks can be configured for different queues such as change of lifecycle state of documents, PDF publications etc.

There are various benefits of having multiple Reprographics servers:

a). In the event of a server failure, the other available server will continue to process remaining work tasks.

b). Handles high volumes and covers scenarios like large PDF creation

c). Improves processing of package.

Note: Reprographics server can be monitored remotely by visiting a URL such as http:///ReproAdmin/viewQueueContents.aspx

Prioritizing Queues

In case of multiple Reprographics queues, priority can be set on each of them. Repo server process each queue in order of priority. For example, server will finish processing the tasks of highest priority queue first before it starts processing lower priority queue.

By default all queues has priority 1 unless it is set in JobSources.xml.

Following can cause Reprographics server to fail:

a). Corrupt or password protected content

b). Infrastructure and/or configuration issue

e.g: An immutable document cannot be rendered. Network slowness causes timeout for task processing. 

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

DAM consists of management tasks related to storage, retrieval and distribution of digital assets. It also refers to the protocol for downloading, renaming, rating, grouping, maintaining and exporting files. The media asset management (MAM) mainly addresses audio, video and animation.

DAM system comprises of computer hardware and software systems that help in the process of digital asset management.

Types of Digital Asset Management Systems

1.       Production asset management systems

It focuses on managing assets as they are created for a digital media production viz. animation, 3D movie, video game. They usually include work-flow and project-management features integrated with the storage organization and revision control of changing digital assets.

2.       Brand asset management systems

Focus of these systems is on facilitation of content reuse within the organization. The type of content it deals with is sales or marketing related. For example: logos, fonts and product images.

3.       Library asset management systems

These systems focus on storage and retrieval of infrequently changing media assets like video or photo archiving.

4.       Digital supply chain services push the digital content out to digital retailers (e.g.  video, music and game)

DAM Vendors

DAM systems are being offered by various vendors in the market. DAM software may be free open source or proprietary.

Open source software:

Resourcespace: It is a php based solution uses MySql as a backend.

www.resourcespace.org

Proprietary software:

http://digitalmedia.opentext.com/

http://www.widen.com/

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/cm/cmgr/mp/edition-enterprise.html

Digital Rights Management (DRM)

DRM is a method of controlling access to copyrighted material in available digital format. In other words, DRM is a shield around the digital content like videos and music to stop privacy. It is a digital management of rights.

In order to design and implement DRM systems, the following two architectures to be considered:

1). Functional Architecture

This covers the high-level modules of DRM system that together provide an end-to-end management of rights.

The DRM system can be modeled in three areas:

a). Intellectual Property (IP) Asset Creation and Capture This module manage the creation of content so it can be easily traded and includes asserting rights when content is first created.

b). IP Asset Management

To manage and enable the trade of content.

c). IP Asset Usage

To manage the usage of content once it has been traded.

These models needs to be complemented by the functional architecture that provides the framework for the modules to implement DRM functionality.

 2). Information Architecture

This covers the modeling of entities within the DRM system as well as their relationships.

DRM Vendors

Below are the some of the DRM vendors

Microsoft

Real Network

Macrovision

IBM

Seclore

Seclore - Information Rights Management
Seclore FileSecure’s IRM connector for IBM FileNet®  empower enterprises with the ability to robustly secure and monitor access to content and information within and outside of IBM FileNet® without any compromise to collaboration and way people work.
 
http://www.seclore.com/ibm_filenet.html

DRM from IBM

IBM has developed two solutions to enforce DRM at low level:

a). DRM-JVM

In this solution digital rights management has been enforced at Java virtual machine(JVM) level. DRM-JVM does not affect the non DRM solutions.

b). WebGuard

This solution enforces copyrights at the browser level.

What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0

The term Web 2.0 is generally used for those web applications (sites) that facilitate collaboration, information sharing on the World Wide Web (WWW).  Examples of Web 2.0 are wikis, blogs, video sharing sites, social networking etc.

The difference between normal web site and Web 2.0 site lies in the way users interact with Web. A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a virtual community while users of websites are limited to the passive viewing of the content available on them.

Although the term Web 2.0 suggests a new version of World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specification, but rather to changes in the way software development and user community use the Web.

 For more information visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

Microsoft Sharepoint 2010

Below are some new features/improvements available in MSP 2010

·         Improved Records Management and Digital Asset Management.

·         Advanced Routing – SP System determines which library/folder the new submitted document should be saved based on the associated meta-data.

·         Document Set – Allows grouping of multiple items in order to consolidate them. For example: documents related to one project can be grouped.

·         Search function has been improved with the features like ‘relevance improvement’, people search and FAST search.

·         Business processes improved

·         Chart Web part have been introduced as an aid to the data visualization.

·         Workflow designer has been improved.

·         Moving of the Workflow from test to production environment has been easy in 2010 which was not in 2007.

·         Export/Import from Visio 2010 is available. [Note: SP stores most of the contents in SQL DB instead of the file system]

·         Sharepoint 2010 is 64 bit means it requires 64-bit Windows Server 2008 and 64-bit SQL Server 2005/2008.

·         Service applications have taken place of Shared Service provider (SSP).

·         Sharepoint 2010 Support Major Browsers.

·         New Content related feature like Rich Media Management, Flexible Records Management and Content organizer

·         Tags, Tag Clouds, Tag Profile, Note board, recent activities, enterprise Wikis, ratings and Keyword suggestion are new community features.

·         Business connectivity services (BCS), Visio services and Access services are introduced as composite(mash-up) features. These services help in pulling data from different sources and combining it in a single place.

Single-Threaded Apartment (STA)

Single-Threaded Apartment (STA)

In .Net, the main method used to be preceded by the following attribute declarations:

[STAThread]

static void Main() {

What is its significance?

After going through multiple blogs and sites I have concluded that if you are not using COM and none of the APIs you are going to use in your application makes use of COM in any way then don’t pay any attention to the concept of APARTMENT.

A thread must use the STA model if it intends to display any GUI. This is the reason why main method has [STAThread] attribute before it.

What is an Apartment?

A process is a collection of virtual memory space, code, data, and system resources.

A thread is code that is to be serially executed within a process.  [A processor executes threads, not processes, so each application has at least one process, and a process always has at least one thread of execution, known as the primary thread. A process can have multiple threads in addition to the primary thread]

In general, the simplest way to view the COM threading architecture is to think of all the COM objects in the process as divided into groups called apartments. A COM object lives in exactly one apartment, in the sense that its methods can legally be directly called only by a thread that belongs to that apartment. Any other thread that wants to call the object must go through a proxy.

What is Single and Multi Thread Apartment?

Single-threaded apartments consist of exactly one thread, so all COM objects that live in a single-threaded apartment can receive method calls only from the one thread that belongs to that apartment. All method calls to a COM object in a single-threaded apartment are synchronized with the windows message queue for the single-threaded apartment's thread. A process with a single thread of execution is simply a special case of this model.

Multithreaded apartments consist of one or more threads, so all COM objects that live in an multithreaded apartment can receive method calls directly from any of the threads that belong to the multithreaded apartment. Threads in a multithreaded apartment use a model called free-threading. Calls to COM objects in a multithreaded apartment are synchronized by the objects themselves.

SHFUSION.DLL - Assembly Cache Viewer

SHFUSION.DLL - Assembly Cache Viewer

Shfusion.dll
This file generally lies in the c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework\ folder. This file is responsible for showing the c:\windows\assembly (.NET GAC folders) as a special folder which does not allow any I/O operations like copy/delete etc.

In order to see the c:\windows\assembly folder as a normal folder just unregister the shfusion.dll. You need to be an administartor on the machine for running regsvr32 command to unregister this dll.

In order to switch back assembly folder to the original (special) view just register the shfusion.dll using regsvr32 command. Visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/34149zk3(v=vs.71).aspx for more information.

Applies to the .Net Framework up to 3

Access List and Default Item Access List(DIAL) - FileNet CS

Access List [This is the list which governs the access of a user to specific objects]An access list can control access on a user-by-user basis, the lists would become long and difficult to maintain if they listed all possible users by name.For ease of implementation of t he access control, the library system allows assigning access rights to groups, because groups contain sets of users who have common access requirements.

Because a user may belong to more than one group in a library system, access control is determined by a user's active group, that is, the group in which a user is currently working. Thus, when users change their active group, their access rights to objects also change accordingly. Using groups to control access greatly simplifies security. Suppose, for example, that there are seventy users in a library system, but these users all fall into three work groups: employees, supervisors, and a personnel department. Since there are also three groups with those same names, the access list for a document that corresponds to an employee's personnel record would need only three entries (one for each group), rather than seventy (one for each
individual user). If groups are created to match the way people work in an organization, their use in controlling access can ensure people will read and modify only the appropriate information.

An access list contains information about the users and groups who have been assigned specific access rights to a particular object. In CS Explorer, this information is displayed as Access Control object properties. Each Access Control object contains three pieces of information:
• The name of a user or a group
• The type of name
• The access rights granted

By default, a library system uses the following search pattern when determining a user’s access rights to a particular object and assigns the first access rights that apply:

1. Checks to see if the user is a member of the Administrators group.
2. Checks in the object's access list for an entry under the user name.
3. Checks in the object's access list for an entry under the user's active group.
4. Checks the access rights assigned to the General Users group, if included in the access list.
5. Assigns the user access rights of None.
Notice that this search pattern ensures that active members of the Administrators group always receive Admin access; thereafter, access rights specifically granted to a user take precedence over those granted to a group.

Default Item Access List [This list get sused when the user adds document into CS]Another way a library system can help users control access to their files is by inserting default entries in document access lists so that the user does not have to provide the same set of entries each time he or she adds a document.

You can specify a set of default item access list entries for each user in his or her User object. Then, each time that user adds a document to the library system from any user interface, the access list of the Item object is filled in with those specified defaults. Of course, to cover special cases, users can always change the access list of any documents they add, but they do not have to start from scratch with each document.
In the same way that you add entries to the default item access list in the User object, you can also specify them in Group objects and the System object.

Thus, the access lists of documents do not necessarily have a standard set of default entries. The library system does add default entries to the document's access list as the document is added, but to determine these defaults, the library system will check for entries in the Default Item Access List properties in the following objects and use the first such list with any entries:

1. The User object
2. The Group object for the user's active group
3. The System object