woodwing

Since its inception Enterprise (formerly known as Smart Connection Enterprise) has been a very flexible solution. When we started with the design of the first version of Enterprise, released in 2004, we had quite a few goals: scalability, easy to install, deploy and maintain, open standards, be able to sell Enterprise in pieces to OEM customers and give our business partners the ability to customize the system without involvement of the core development team.

Obviously it helped that this wasn't our first or second system, so we could use all the experience of the past, going back to the late eighties. And we had a fair bit of luck, we picked technologies that turned out to be winners. We still remember the early discussions we had about why on earth we selected PHP or MySQL... But over the past years, while big players like Sun and IBM were embracing these technologies, people have been complimenting us for our choices...

With Enterprise 6 we're bringing our flexibility to a new level. On the server side we have introduced a plug-in framework that is making it easier than ever to extend or integrate the system. The modularity with these PHP-based plug-ins makes sharing and deployment of customizations and integrations much easier than before. We can imagine a whole new market of Enterprise plug-ins, let's see...

We're often surprised ourselves about the power of the plug-in mechanism. During the pre-release cycle of Enterprise 6 we ran into a compatibility issue with our Smart Browser 5 client application. Within an afternoon one of our InDesign C++ developers wrote his first server plug-in (in PHP, not being his native language) to implement a Smart Browser 5 compatibility plug-in. I can imagine that this sounds a bit nerdy, forgive me my background as software engineer ;-)

Perhaps better examples are demo plug-ins we did for IfraExpo 2008 in Amsterdam:
- QR codes (2D barcodes) - whenever a dossier is published to the web from Content Station, a QR code image is generated and added to the dossier. This took just a few hours.
- SMS publication channel - integrating an SMS gateway, allowing to send content via SMS directly from Content Station. Took less than 2 hours.
- iPhone optimizer - whenever the iPhone application downloads a page picture it's scaled down to iPhone resolution to save bandwidth (which is still a bottleneck on 3G networks). This was written on the show floor...

Obviously these were just small things and only demo's. It would probably take a few days to finish and fully QA them, but these are nice examples of the power of the Enterprise 6 plug-in framework.

In the first installations of Enterprise 6 (in Germany, UK and Indonesia) various plug-ins have been developed by our Business Partners to integrate with FingerPost Wire, Digital Collections, TV data and probably more which I'm not aware of.

During the next few months while we're working on our next releases, we'll also spend some time on goody plug-ins. It will be fun to do, will give you an even better idea what can be achieved and hopefully we'll be surprised again.