SGHE Summit – Project Horizon Technical Overview – Bob Rullo (@bobrullo)

* power in Moscone West went out just as Bob started his talk. He did a great job working through his presentation with no slides! Great job, Bob!

SGHE Summit – Project Horizon Technical Overview

- needs Oracle 11gR1 database, Oracle Weblogics App Server, Java 6, Grails 1.1
- moving from Banner INB forms to new Horizon (Aurora UI) architecture
- need to migrate CRUD and transaction validation, field level validation (UI centric validation)

Grails Architecture
- a controller handles requests and talks to services to provide a response (data back to the user)
- blocks and fields map to the domain model like a row in a relational table
- field level validation moves to the view as do the canvases and windows – AJAX based

- leveraging automation techniques – by gathering metadata in the Banner Db and create a domain object
- can generate 80 to 90% of the domain models with these tools

- services are also being generated as well as the UI – where are fields located and how do we navigate between them

- we will be allowed access to these automation tools for our custom code and modifications
- look at providing us preview releases to get familiar on how things work and provide feedback to SGHE

- test early and often approach – huge increase in unit tests 100 to over 1000 = better quality
- our people need to learn GRAILS, java, groovy skills as well as spring and hibernate, still using PL/SQL apis
** SGHE please provide us a VM spec for a sample sandbox application

Resource Oriented Architecture – RESTful architecture allows us to extend our Open Digital Campus

More sessions …IT Lounge on Tuesday at 4pm

Electronic Banner Access Request (eBAR) Workflow – Portland State University

Replace paper form routing from Portland State University

Electronic routing – replaced two paper forms with Banner Self Service online form – uses Banner Workflow to route the request

Advantages of eBAR Workflows

• faster than paper request process
• can be routed to multiple users in parallel
• no time wasted delivering paper between offices
• no lost paper forms
• password delivery via BSS = security
• copy permissions from an existing user
• “I Agree” checkbox for Acceptable Use Policy
• dynamically routes to supervisor (right now user picks their supervisor)
• auto creates workflow account for supervisor
• supervisors can assign any workflow user as proxy
• created a way to determine segregation of duties when applying Banner user classes and in particular objects (requester must explain why they are requesting access that violates the segregation of duty conflicts)

Business Decisions

• Authn
  • Banner INB
  • Enterprise LDAP
• user creation
  • used workflow

Workflow Setup

• workflows can not span orgns but a workflow can initiate a workflow in another orgn
• TIP – design your workflow around your orgn not around Banner modules

Roles

• System Administrators = IT Staff
• Business Analysts = IT Staff, Banner Coordinators
• Request Approvers = supervisors
• HR Employee = Human Resources staff
• Banner Coordinators
• Business Affairs Director
• Account Creator = DBA
• eBAR Admin

Demo … run through Banner Self Service and Banner Workflow

Challenges

• modeler hangs when trying to validate model – had to reduce the number of activities in the model by moving processing to dB procedures, save results in temp tables, etc
• mapping external event parameters to workflow model – load all 30 parameters into a temp table before event fires, map one parm  to find others
• using javascript in custom activities – use a dbproc to gen javascript
• custom activity forms are very limited – create a custom activity with only a few text areas, use a dbproc and javascript to create the functionality

Lessons Learned

• design for easy maintenance – making changes to the Workflow model can be tedious – put as much into dbprocs to keep model simple
• design for user friendliness – generate HTML view to display over the Workflow form, use drop down menus and checkboxes, dynamically create these menus and checkboxes

Tonight, I had the privilege of being a guest lecturer on Enterprise Architecture for a class at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. My colleague Brian Hosier invited me to give an overview of EA for his students.

I had to do some serious chopping of my 2 hour workshop to get things down to a manageable timeframe. Even then, I felt extremely rushed and barely skimmed the surface of all that Enterprise Architecture is.  The class went well and I got great questions from the students.  I hope this short introduction to EA helped some of them think about the big picture.

As I was presenting, I realized how much our EA practices are IT influenced. This is a natural thing being that we grew EA out of IT and IT is where it primarily resides. As I presented some of the artifacts we developed, it became apparent that I need to rethink how to present EA to newbies. After a bit of theory and overview, I presented how EA can be applied strategically, tactically and then a bit on business architecture.  The problem was that for each area except Business Architecture, my examples were very technology focused.

I will make time to review my course material to see how to restructure it to better communicate the complete breadth of Enterprise Architecture.  Perhaps reviewing my notes from the Carnegie Mellon Certified Enterprise Architect program I completed in 2009 will help.  I need to find more examples of artifacts that are more people and process oriented.  In today’s fiscal climate, perhaps more focus on cost savings by focusing on managing complexity and its impact on organizations.