How can we best leverage the LiveLink store to allow documents to be integrated in other systems?

Project Title: LiveLink integration
Client: Large Communications Consultancy

Background:
Integrating other systems to LiveLink, document storage, you get the best of both worlds; secure document management via a Livelink directory system, and customised business workflow.

This project is a sub-component of a larger application designed to deliver Best Practice Consulting Methodology via web and windows based applications.

The business process information is held in a structured form as XML documents. Those structured documents would be held centrally in a livelink store. External systems would then pick up those structured documents on a regular basis.

Challenge:

• Users were defining their business processes (offline) recording them using the process capture tool. The XML process files are then stored within LiveLink
• differing levels of security had been enabled across LiveLink so that teams could manage their own documents
• LiveLink was the chosen company solution and had been paid for, therefore to move to a simple “shared directory” structure would not be approved at this time.
• documents had to be maintained with high security, so that if they were passed outside of the business they would be useless and therefore maintain confidentiality.
• integrating external applications to LiveLink is notoriously difficult.

Development Approach:
A component based approach was approved, in order that we would provide a secure mechanism to retrieve files from LiveLink and enable other applications to use them

Design featured included;

• ability to list the inventory of files with LiveLink
• configure a “folder exclude list” of directories that should not be looked at by the system
• configure a “file exclude list” of files or file types that should not be looked at by the system
• resilient and fault tolerant
• in testing we found the interfaces to livelink could be erratic depending on the load the servers would be under 
• security settings on directories would be respected, so users could only see the files they have permissions to see
• files would be downloaded and checked as they were pulled in

The Outcome:
The integration piece works efficiently and delivered to the requirement. While developing the piece an iterative approach was taken as more was learned about the capabilities and restrictions on livelink.

The application has proved to be highly resilient and recovers from error gracefully without user involvement.In the live environment the application will draw down @ 300 files per hour, encrypting, checking and processing as it goes.

Bottom Line:
The project was conceived and delivered over a 3 week period as a sub-component of a larger fixed budget project. The application ensures that there is a single secure store of all busineness practice documentation. That documentation can then be easily and securely distributed via the integration to livelink.

Technologies employed:
Microsoft Vb.Net
ASP.net
SQL Server
XML
3DES Encryption technologies.

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