Top level Configuration Management Activity Model

Nuxeo was recently handed a challenge in the context of a client prospect. They needed to handle configuration management. At Nuxeo, we like challenges, and even more, we like the opportunity to demonstrate that the Nuxeo Platform is so flexible and customizable that it can adapt to many different types of projects.

(Resources mentioned during this article are regrouped in a specific section at the end).

Many different reasons lead more and more companies to take the path of setting up a configuration management system. Historically, CM was used in military engineering organizations but it is now seen in many civil domains. It can be required for regulatory compliance, i.e. in aeronautics or medical device development, but can also be a choice for quality certifications and process improvement systems.

Configuration management applies to a wide range of domains, from huge mechanical systems to electronic devices to software, a system being very often a mix of a mechanical systems with electronic devices and software to control and monitor everything (a car for instance).

There are many standards for configuration management, depending on the business area. A few of them are:

• CMMI for Development, version 1.2 Configuration Management
• ANSI/EIA-649-1998 National Consensus Standard for Configuration Management
• EIA-649-A 2004 National Consensus Standard for Configuration Management
• TechAmerica/ANSI EIA-649-B 2011 Configuration Management Standard
• ISO 10007:2003 Quality management systems – Guidelines for configuration management
• Federal Standard 1037C
• STANAG 4159 NATO Materiel Configuration Management Policy and Procedures for Multinational Joint Projects
• STANAG 4427 Introduction of Allied Configuration Management Publications (ACMPs)

For a first introduction to configuration management principles and vocabulary, you can refer to the configuration management wikipedia page : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Configuration_management
If you are in the software industry, CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) for development is one of the references.

As stated by the CMMI approach, “The purpose of Configuration Management (CM) is to establish and maintain the integrity of work products using configuration identification, configuration control, configuration status accounting, and configuration audits.”

Nuxeo offers many tools and features that just need to be leveraged and adapted for a configuration management project. As part of a proof of concept, we developed some custom features to handle a configuration management project, using Nuxeo Studio and Nuxeo IDE.

The result is a Nuxeo Studio Application Template and a custom operation developed with Nuxeo IDE. Although this first template is not a complete configuration management application, it shows how Nuxeo can be used to handle concepts like configuration, configuration items, and baselines from creation, manipulation, to audit and verification.

The Studio Application Template

In Nuxeo Studio, you will find an Application Template (Settings and Versioning) called Configuration_Management.

The logic of the template is to provide tools to manage project documentation through configuration management from creation to audit and control.

Our Approach to a Configuration Management Template

A documentation tree to be managed by the application is called a Configuration. Every file and folder created in it will be under configuration management control.

For that, they have specific metadata inherited from the schema “configuration_management”. For example, every file is linked to its parent configuration and has a unique reference given on creation. If a document is copied into another configuration, the parent configuration is updated, but the reference stays the same. It enables to watch a file throughout its configurations and evolutions (a specific tab is added on the type File to display every location and configuration of the file copies).

The versioning system of Nuxeo is used to manage and know which files are validated or working versions. By choice, every minor version is know as a reviewing and working version whereas major version are used only for validated version of the document. Please note that no specific validation process, such as a RACI, has been configured for this first version.

So working under configuration management with Nuxeo starts by creating a Configuration (one per project or product typically). Then create the project tree and the project files. These files can be new files or can be copied (forked) from other projects. The File minor and major versions are used to know which are validated or not, and the Configuration tab on Files gives a look to all major version and copies of this file throughout the system.

Baseline

One very important aspect of configuration management is to track the state of the documentation set at key moments of the project, for example at client releases. These snapshots of the configuration state are called baselines. A baseline reflects the state of the configuration at a specific moment — it’s a view of latest validated versions of all documents of the configuration.

To manage baselines, a doc type called Baseline can be created into a Baseline_library. By default, a Baseline is in pending state as the baseline can be prepared and then generated only when needed. A user action is provided on the Baseline Folder Toolbar to actually baseline the configuration.

It launches the baselineConfiguration automation chain, whose role is to set to the baseline to the generated state and actually generate the baseline using a specific automation operation.

The specific operation is called “Baseline Configuration” and has been implemented with Nuxeo IDE.
The operation calls a recursive method that will copy the configuration tree into the baseline and will also create a virtual copy of the latest validated version of the document.

This virtual copy is called a proxy in Nuxeo and it’s a read only copy of the latest major version of the document. (A proxy is very much like a symbolic link on an Unix-like OS: a proxy points to a document and will look like a document from the user point of view) . Proxies are used to be able to see the same document from several places without duplicating data — exactly what is needed when generating a baseline. We do not want to duplicate the document, just create a link to it. (more info on proxies here)

In the end, when a baseline is generated, it shows the same tree as the parent configuration, but each folder only contain proxies of latest validated version of the files.

If you take a look at the baseline operation source code, you will see that it gets the configuration parent folder, the baseline parent folder and call a recursive method (baselineFolder) with those 2 folders as parameters. BaselineFolder gets the children of the configuration node:

if they are folderish (an attribute in Nuxeo meaning a document type can have children), it copies them into the baseline node and recall itself on each new child node
if the node is not folderish, it looks for the latest major version and create a proxy of the document into the baseline node.

Conclusion

Configuration management is a complex process, but using the right tool can ease up things.

There are many keys to a successful configuration management system, one of them is identification and control of the configuration and its configuration items, and another one is managing the different roles in your system. We decided to focus this proof of concept on the identification and control of the items throughout their evolutions in the system. To do so, we used Nuxeo features such as versioning, proxies, content views and extensibility. In a final application, other Nuxeo features such as relation, document locking and workflows would probably leveraged too.

Please do not hesitate to try today’s example and give us feedback — we are also very interested to discuss how you may have set up configuration management process in your organization.

Ressources :

Here is the documentation page of the Studio Application templates, on this page you will find more detailed information about the application template, you will also find links to the market place package, the github project and other interesting ressources.
http://doc.nuxeo.com/x/b4Ce

For those who have been using Nuxeo for years, you know very well the Summary view of a document… and its flaws. It was time for a facelift… but not a superficial Botox one. More like George Clooney’s. Welcome to Hollywood.

As you know, we had a certain number of constraints, such as compatibility with previous customizations, scalability, and making it accessible to Nuxeo Studio for customization. So there was hard work behind the scenes also!

Here’s the result!

Do more in a single tab

The first thing was to ease navigation and information access. That’s why we wanted to provide a better and clearer display of information.

Now, you can access the most important information from the Summary view. If you don’t need a specific history or workflow detail, for example, you have all the information you need in the summary.

For details, you can click the other tabs, but you have all the key info on the first one.

Actions

We improved the configurability of actions on the Summary tab, and we brought the icons up to date.

Share

What’s your first reaction when you find an article or a document interesting? Share it!

That is why we had to make the Share action quick and simple: you just have to copy the selected permalink, and then tweet it, send it by email, etc.

Download

When you want to download a document to read it offline, or to send it to external people, the download option has to be quick and efficient.

That is why we now provide a global download option for the document to download all the attached files. If you want to download only one attached document, you will choose the usual green arrow at the attached document level.

Follow

Instead of  having to choose the actions to subscribe to for email alerts (which is a very modular but complicated way of doing things), Nuxeo now provides a single “follow” option to subscribe to all notifications. Follow can apply to a document or a workspace.

This way, you or your team members won’t spend time asking yourselves which notification would be interesting: you will just follow!

“More” menu

An additional menu has been added. When you already show 5 actions, (i.e. the 5 buttons displayed), the other (and secondary) actions automatically go in the “More” menu. 

New look

A new look for all of the tabs

The tabs interface elements have also been redesigned, as you can see below.

Participants

A new slot is dedicated to the participants of the document: author, contributor and last contributor. Each name also links to the participant’s profile.

You find this article interesting? You should go and check the author’s profile, and his other articles, via his activity feed!

Redesign of metadata column

While we were at it, we also provided a new look for the metadata column, which includes tags, version information, a description, etc.

Now, you just have to wait for the 5.6 release to see it for yourself on Nuxeo!

Stay tuned, there’s more to come!

Delphine Renevey

The whole Nuxeo team contributes to the documentation, by updating existing content, writing new pages to provide information about new features, or by reviewing content.
Just like we love having feedback on our Platform and how you use it, we’re always happy to know how people use our documentation. That’s why we decided to launch a survey to find out more about how people use the documentation center and what they are expecting from it.

Although it’s not the only way to send us your feedback, this 10-question survey is an opportunity for you to tell us what you think about our documentation: what’s your general opinion, what’s the most important piece of documentation for you, what do you think is missing, what improvements would you expect? So please take 5 minutes to answer the survey :)

On this day, Thierry gave a 15-minute technical introduction — not too detailed — about the concepts and strong points of the Nuxeo Platform that I really liked. He ended up with the presentation of the Nuxeo Platform below, where the whole concept of the platform is explained. It shows in a very simple way that the Nuxeo Platform is not only a set of building blocks that you assemble randomly, but that it has a very carefully designed modular architecture. It is a unique approach, and surely the big differentiator compared to all other enterprise content management software solutions on the market, many of which use the word platform as only a name. This is certainly the reason why Nuxeo loves developers and developers love Nuxeo!

If you don’t know what I am talking about here, maybe it’s best to just go through the following 12 slides! It should not take you more than 15 mn…

We will be at the AIIM Conference in San Francisco March 20th. We will participate in a panel discussion about the future of Content Management. Feel free to contact us in advance if you want to discuss Nuxeo, open source, content management, or other topics!

We will be at Documation in Paris March 21st and 22nd, where we will facilitate two workshops. (The conference, and the workshops will be in French.) Check it out here for more information.

Please come over and feel free to contact us in advance if you want to meet up!

Cheers,

For those who aren’t familiar with Drive, it’s a small piece of software introduced a couple of years ago that complements Creative Suite, it helps by plugging Creative Suite software applications into a digital asset management solution. Drive supports either Version Cue or a CMIS generic connector, which is what makes it interesting for Nuxeo as the Nuxeo Platform offers a native CMIS implementation. Adobe Drive can be downloaded on Adobe’s website.

As an Adobe product, Drive should speak to creative folks using Creative Suite and naturally, I first started to look at how this works in Photoshop, the Suite’s flagship product as I think it would be a nice way for end-users of Creative Suite to leverage Nuxeo.

To put succinctly, Drive provides end-users with the ability to work using their usual desktop tools (e.g. Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator and more, including Finder or the Windows explorer) to create digital assets using their normal workflow while at the same time storing and managing these assets directly in Nuxeo. Having the assets in a platform such as Nuxeo brings many opportunities thanks to the many features of the platform, such as (to name just a few): team collaboration, archiving and versioning (as baseline features), back-end post processing for content transformation, publishing, meta-data enrichment or integration with any existing content-centric workflow that your Nuxeo application might run… All of these major components to a robust creative digital asset workflow! But to cut to the chase—this will significantly improve sharing, collaboration and security throughout the process of creating and managing content and will make end-users’ lives easier!

Here’s a short movie that showcases my first foray into the Adobe Drive CMIS experience, from Photoshop.

What we see here is that Drive obviously brings more than what could normally be done using a WebDAV-based desktop integration: Adobe Drive will support built-in versioning, ensuring that changes made by the user are tracked and recorded. This is of great value and definitely a “+1″ for CMIS standards. Despite the fact that Adobe Drive’s checkin/checkout model is a bit different than Nuxeo’s locking model, there is no doubt both can work hand in hand.

Beyond Photoshop, I wanted to also look at the desktop integration in my finder (I am a Mac user but Windows would work the same).
I found the experience good as well, which really makes me think Drive is yet an additional option for Desktop Integration for Nuxeo applications, potentially even outside of the creative world.

This second video will show how to connect and how to send office documents from your desktop to Drive.

While this is great, to be totally honest, we encountered some issues with mapping the files to Nuxeo documents, and while it seems simple, this might always require some custom configuration (yes, Nuxeo is much more than a file based document system… and as document types are highly configurable, neither Adobe Drive or CMIS can guess for you! Feel free to ask more about this on http://answers.nuxeo.com if you don’t get it!). So, for now, mapping with document types in Nuxeo is done based on file extensions so that a “.jpg” can be imported into an “Image” document type in Nuxeo and a “.pdf” or “.doc” into a generic document in Nuxeo. There is obviously room for improvement.

To be completely transparent, while we work with folks at Adobe on the CMIS standard, as this is an area we are heavily involved in, we don’t have a strong partnership on the product side yet (although we would obviously love to do more on the product fields, hint-hint, in case some Adobe folks read this post). This means that the association of Nuxeo and Drive has not been heavily tested, this was just a test drive (um, no pun intended!). We haven’t yet checked all the use cases and the details of how CMIS was implemented in Drive, nor have we done some load and stress testing on the client. But thanks to CMIS and, if this is well implemented, one should not expect too many problems. Feel free, however, to reach out if you are interested, have experience with this type of integration, or have specific needs!

In summary, I think it’s great to see products like Adobe Drive coming out with strong support of CMIS. It, once more, demonstrates the success of the CMIS initiative, and takes it a little beyond the initial and usual use cases that center around connecting server-side content applications together. This shows that CMIS can also be a great layer to improve interoperability of content management platforms like Nuxeo with desktop and mobile applications alike!

One of the newest features of the 5.5 release is the Social Collaboration module (https://github.com/nuxeo/nuxeo-social-collaboration). It brings some more social power to document and content management, moving slightly Nuxeo in the Enterprise 2.0 fields. Here’s the list of Social modules included with this addon:

• Nuxeo Social Workspace: provides a new Social Workspace incorporating social features like dashboards for public view as well as members view, members management and invitations.
• Nuxeo User Relationship: provides a Service which handles relations between two objects which in this case is a UI to manage relations between users.
• Nuxeo User Activity Stream: provides a JSF view and OpenSocial gadget to display what users in your network/your relations are doing.
• Nuxeo Mini Message: provides a service, JSF view and OpenSocial gadget to add / remove / display mini messages created by users.

The complete details on Social Collaboration are available on our wiki (http://doc.nuxeo.com/x/QoGN).

Additionally, Heather and I did a quick screencast that gives you a quick tour of this module:

We’ll probably do shorter screencasts highlighting specific features of the Social Collaboration module in the future, so stay tuned :)

Happy holidays, Merry Christmas!

This is a great milestone, and one more achievement in implementing our vision behind the Nuxeo Platform!

But before jumping to features, documentation and other things, I thought it would be useful to provide some insight about this "yet another thing" provided by Nuxeo. So, before talking about Nuxeo IDE, I will indeed start with a quick overview of Nuxeo Studio!

Nuxeo Studio and now Nuxeo IDE…  huh?

Nuxeo Studio is, as you might know, Nuxeo's "Customization as a Service" tool, and like Nuxeo IDE, it aims at making the developer's life easier. 

It is software provided as a service, hosted, and runs 100% in a browser. We love this vision and definitely believe it fits with the future of software development: in the browser and in the cloud.

Nuxeo Studio was first released early 2010 and has been improved continuously, up to a point where today, the range of features is really impressive and we have many customers who love it!  

It can be used to customize Nuxeo in many ways, from defining content views to new content types or working with automation chains to the very basics of look and feel customization! It now includes application templates, which help new users to quickly get started with Nuxeo and implement what they want. And, we still have a long long list of ideas for future features in the backlog. 

This being said, we always knew Nuxeo Studio was really about "customizing" and not about "extending" the Nuxeo Platform. In other words, Nuxeo Studio is not a place to write new lines of Java code to develop brand new functionalities, such as a new content operations or whole new applications. And while we were improving Nuxeo Studio, we were indeed creating a gap between how simple it was to "customize" the Nuxeo platform and how "not that simple" it was to extend it further!

Customize in your browser, code on your laptop!

Not only that, but developers (from our development team and from the community) started to highlight the need to be able to work with both Nuxeo Studio and Java development on the platform simultaneously. That is how the idea of Nuxeo IDE came late spring 2011: to provide tooling to Java developers to extend the platform, making them more efficient but also enabling them to work with Nuxeo Studio as a customization interface.

In our ideal world, we would love to provide a fully browser-based IDE provided as a service, like Nuxeo Studio (and actually, don't worry, we will keep looking at that for the long term :-)), enabling Java developers to code, build, deploy and run from a naked workstation, in a browser! Truth is, this might be the future of software development — but it ain't for today, or tomorrow!

The reality is that today and still for some time, when it comes to serious development, real Java developers are using Eclipse (ok there are also some other tools…), are confident with it and will keep working with it for a long time. Based on that assessment, we decided to work on Nuxeo IDE, a new tool based on the Eclipse IDE, that will be part of the toolbox for Nuxeo developers, standing next to Nuxeo Studio for customization.

Nuxeo IDE is in no way saying we won't go in the direction of "developing in the Cloud". By "connecting" to Nuxeo Connect and Nuxeo Studio, it does exactly this: enables development in the cloud as much as possible, and many upcoming features will explore that direction! Still, the core of the Java development has to remain on the laptop, for some more time. 

So what are the goals of Nuxeo IDE and what can it help with?

The goals of Nuxeo IDE are simple: make it easy for developers who want to go beyond Nuxeo Studio by developing new code to plug on the Nuxeo Platform!

This will bring productivity, efficiency and comfort to development teams in charge of customizing the platform, and will be an additional criteria for choosing the Nuxeo Platform against other technologies.

What can Nuxeo IDE do for you in this first version? Already a lot!

• First of all, and here we are definitely talking about productivity, Nuxeo IDE embeds an SDK and a deployment system which makes it possible to automatically deploy your development work and see it live, thanks to the Hot Reload capability of the platform, without having to use external tools or go to the test environment and restart the server! Developers will definitely love that! 
• Again about productivity, Nuxeo IDE comes with a set of templates for new projects, so developers don't have to start from scratch. This includes a template for regular project, a template for Web Engine based project, a template for content operations and content services… A definitive time saver for developers, whether they work on a new project or on a proof of concept or prototype!
• And still about productivity, Nuxeo IDE is designed to be bound to your Nuxeo Studio project. Doing so, all the customization work done in Nuxeo Studio is understood by Nuxeo IDE projects, making it able to provide helpful features, such as code completion on content structures that you might have customized in your Nuxeo Studio project.

And Nuxeo IDE provides many more features, like a system to manage deployment profiles, an integrated Nuxeo Shell and others that I will let you discover later.

What doesn't Nuxeo IDE provide? 

First of all, Nuxeo IDE does not provide features that are already in Nuxeo Studio. As explained above, the two tools are complementary, and the goal is not to provide an advanced alternative to Nuxeo Studio, but a companion. We think it would be confusing to have two tools for the same thing, and looking at how Nuxeo Studio does the job when it comes to customization, we definitely want to stay on that track! Nuxeo Studio will continue to be developed, offering new and unexpected customization capabilities!

Second, Nuxeo IDE doesn't look at the past — it is a tool developed for the next generation of the Nuxeo Platform. It comes today with a SDK based on the latest development version of the Nuxeo Platform, and it won't be adapted for 5.4.2 or even older versions. This is only the first version of a tool that is here to stay, and following our open development model, we wanted to make this available and wanted to have as many developers as possible using it from the beginning. Use it, try it, engage with us and feel free to contribute and get back to us — this is open source software!

Third, plenty of other features and templates that we are only starting to think about. Here as well, please engage and get in touch with us if you want to team with us for the next versions of the tool.

And fourth: bug free software! We know this doesn't exist. We have been testing Nuxeo IDE internally for a while, and we are really happy about the quality of the code, but we know bug free software would be a lie! So if you find a bug, report it.

So what next?

We will certainly be blogging more about Nuxeo Studio but for now, if you are a Nuxeo developer, or on your way to becoming one, I can only recommend that you give it a test run:

• Get it from its dedicated Eclipse Marketplace page
• Jump on the Nuxeo IDE documentation space dedicated to this new project — even if we are still working on it, the installation manual is already pretty solid
• If you still have questions, ask them on our QA website, you'll get answers!
• And if you find bugs, please report them on the dedicated bug tacker. 

Greetings to the amazing R&D team at Nuxeo!

Roland

Define and Structure Your Case Management Solution

Since Nuxeo CMF is built with the Nuxeo EP technology, all of the customization features available in Studio, such as application branding, custom search form design, content view configuration, etc., are also available for Nuxeo CMF. In addition, new features have been added that are specific to a case-based solution.

• Create a case. Using the file cabinet paradigm, a case is the folder that holds all of the documents and content relevant to the case. Nuxeo Studio enables the definition of one or multiple types of cases, each with a specific lifecycle and metadata to help with search and classification.
• Define a case item. Documents or other elements found in the file folder are called case items. A generic case item, with its own metadata, can be defined and associated with a case.
• Define operations. With Nuxeo Studio, you can define a chain of operations that triggers automatically from a given action. For example, you may want to start a pre-defined workflow when a new case item is entered. Distribution and route management operations are available to help define and automate case management processes.
• Lifecycles. A default lifecycle can be used as an example, to facilitate the creation of custom lifecycles, or it can be used as is. The graphical lifecycle definition tool makes this custom setting easy to learn.  

  Nuxeo Studio is delivered in a hosted environment, eliminating the pain of installation, upgrade and maintenance. Even better, an automatic connection between Studio and CMF enables one-click customization project installations, with hot reload. For anyone who has gone through cycles of developing, installing, and testing, this time-saving trick is going to rock your world!

Cool beans. How do I get started?

Installing Nuxeo CMF and starting your first customization project with Nuxeo Studio will probably take all of about 10 minutes — a prototyper’s dream! Here’s are some helpful links:

• Download Nuxeo CMF. The installation wizard will offer a free 30-day trial of Nuxeo Studio.
• Nuxeo CMF documentation
• Nuxeo Studio documentation
• Release Notes for Nuxeo Studio
• Release Notes for Nuxeo CMF

Spend a few minutes on the test drive, then send us your feedback. We love to know what our users think – it keeps us on our toes.

– @JaneZupan

This latest release of Nuxeo DM, and its underlying platform, Nuxeo EP, features contributions from customers Gagnavarslan and Leroy Merlin, a smoother UI experience driven by community feedback, and a glimpse of new things to come for the Nuxeo Platform and product line. 

Links, Resources & More

Following are a few links for more information on this new version:

• Press Release
• Recap of new version on www.nuxeo.com
• A series of blog posts from the Nuxeo Developers' Blog describing new features in this version
• Technical details – blog post on Release Candidate 1 of Nuxeo DM / EP 5.4.2
• Blog post on Release Candidate 2 from Stefane Fermigier
• Release notes – as captured by our issue tracker, Jira
• Download
• Online Trial.

Shout Out to Contributors

The Nuxeo community helps us make great software by giving feedback, and by contributing back their code. For version 5.4.2, we'd especially like to thank the following contributors:

• Jónas Sigurðsson, Gagnavarslan, and his team, for the WSS connector based on WebDAV 
• Damien Metzler, Leroy Merlin, and his team, for the GWT OpenSocial container
• Nina Bagouli, Knowledge Broadband Services SA, for Greek translations
• Hiromi Kimura, University of Tsukuba, for Japanese translations
• Jackie Ju, Intalio, for fixing a drag'n'drop issue in an iFrame.

Get In on the Action

As always, your feedback is welcome, as Nuxeo technology is a project that is 100% open source. Check out our Jira issue tracker for up-to-date information about the current set of open tasks. Join the nuxeo-dev forum and mailing list to voice your thoughts on open source content management and the Nuxeo platform. And watch this space for our thoughts on where we want to take the Nuxeo platform next.

– @JaneZupan