Catch-up on RavenBlack’s OpenText World Asia Presentation

Reinventing Content Server Development with RavenBlack Productivity Suite

Founder and president of RavenBlack, Greg Petti, discussed how OpenText users are tailoring their Content Suite and Extended ECM platforms to meet their organization’s specific needs and goals.

A Turbo Talk for Customization Success

Greg drew from over 20 years of experience to demonstrate how OpenText Content Intelligence (WebReports) can transform the way companies adapt Content Server to their specific business needs and processes.
Here are a few of the highlights and insights from Greg’s talk at OpenText World Asia.

Boost productivity, convenience, and internal collaboration

Those organizations that align Content Server to their business’ needs are the ones who achieve maximum return on investment. By simply tailoring Content Server to work with your processes, you can create advantages that deliver long-term benefits to your company.

How to customize Content Server without the need for custom OScript modules

The catch is that developing within Content Server is not always straightforward. Content Server caters to many businesses and, by definition, is not specifically tailored to your precise business needs. To achieve this, you have to adapt the core capabilities that Content Server provides or change them entirely by using OScript.
Companies who have used customized OScript modules, sometimes experience difficulties when upgrading their systems, hindering their ability to gain the maximum value out of their investment in Content Server.
Greg illustrated how businesses can alternatively customize their Content Server implementation through Content Intelligence (WebReports) applications while reducing their exposure to upgrades. Building applications with WebReports you can achieve most things that would otherwise be done with OScript. This approach also works for customers who are resistant to Oscript module-based customizations and particularly for cloud customers where custom OScript modules are restricted.

How to audit, support, or maintain complex WebReport based applications

Greg pointed out that WebReports are essentially software building blocks that allow data from various sources to be processed and then output to configured destinations. Each WebReport can call one or more other WebReports, and any WebReport can act as a custom request handler. This power and flexibility allow developers to build very complex applications potentially with hundreds of interconnected WebReports operating on different schedules, responding to triggers, user requests, and more.
This can create a managerial challenge for administrators and developers. Trying to visualize the code, data flow and references for such an application is difficult and makes it complicated for customers to manage their Content Intelligence applications.
RavenBlack has a solution for this challenge in the form of the Ravenblack Productivity Suite. This solution significantly reduces the cost and effort involved in creating, auditing, supporting, and maintaining Content Intelligence (WebReports) developments. This helps save users time developing, debugging, and maintaining WebReports and the applications that use them. It also enables developers to shorten development cycles by using pre-written and tested sub-tags.
The Ravenblack Productivity Suite introduces fundamental improvements for users who create and manage WebReports with three products: The Application Analyzer, The Sub-Tag Loader, and The Extended Sub-Tag Suite.
In the Turbo Talk, Greg specifically presented the Application Analyzer product. At the click of a button, the Application Analyzer generates structured views of the software relationships for an application including a hierarchy graphing tool to clearly visualize how multiple WebReports are interconnected.
The Application Analyzer also provides a variety of other relationships to aid in understanding how components are integrated as triggers, scheduled objects, overrides, and perspective widgets among other things. Features such as version comparisons, source analysis, documentation assembly, and feature inspection are richly deployed throughout the application.
If you want to discover more details on the Application Analyzer and other parts of the productivity suite, visit the product page.

WebReports guidance through services and products

Greg talked about how Ravenblack is improving and supporting WebReports application development for customers and partners and explained how Ravenblack products such as the analyzer are gradually absorbing this expertise and providing automated expert tools.
With over 20 years of experience and an origin story that starts as the original inventors of WebReports, RavenBlack has significant expertise to provide to the legion of customers and partners who benefit from the Content Intelligence suite of products.

Watch the presentation for more insight

A surprising amount was covered in the 14-minute, turbo presentation so only a summary is possible in a single blog post. To get the actual video presentation, click here below to watch the RavenBlack Turbo Talk.

Additionally, if you are looking for guidance or training in the design, development, or support of WebReports based solutions, please consider contacting RavenBlack to take advantage of our deep knowledge and expertise. Visit our contact page, and let’s work together towards solutions that are personalized for your business.