Business process automation with IBM Lotus Expeditor and IBM

Business process automation with IBM Lotus Expeditor and IBM Lotus Forms Abstract: In this podcast, we will discuss benefits of integrating IBM Lotus® Forms with IBM Lotus Expeditor software, and how this integration can be achieved. Electronic forms can help businesses to reduce costs through streamlining and automating formsdriven business processes. IBM Lotus® Expeditor software provides security-rich automatic synchronization to deliver forms to business processes. It also enables the aggregation of these forms in composite applications. Transcription DUTCHER: Welcome to this Lotus® Expeditor Podcast about Business Process Automation with Offline Forms using IBM Lotus Forms and [IBM] Lotus Expeditor [software]. I'm David Dutcher, Worldwide Technical Sales Support for Enterprise Access, and I'm joined today by Angus McIntyre, Product Manager for Lotus Expeditor. McINTYRE: Hi, David, thanks for having me here today. DUTCHER: Explain this podcast series, Angus. What is this podcast series about, and why should developers care? McINTYRE: David this is the third in the series of podcasts on using Lotus Expeditor to extend applications out to the edge of the network. Its goal is to show IT organizations and developers that they can reuse both their skills and their applications that they've created to extend these out to the people that need information in either offline or disconnected or mobile mode. It's all about productivity. When you provide information for people that's fit for purpose and you're able to make them work either online or offline, it's all about productivity. The series is in six parts: -- [1] Introduction Lotus Expeditor -- [2] Taking Portal Offline with Expeditor -1- -- [3] Business Process Automation with Offline Forms in Lotus Expeditor -- this podcast -- [4] Taking WebSphere® Applications Offline with Lotus Expeditor -- [5] How to do Mobile Access in terms of PDAs and smartphones with Lotus Expeditor; and then to finalize it, -- [6] Expeditor as an Open Alternative to Microsoft® .NET [Framework] and Silverlight™. DUTCHER: help solve? Angus, what business problem does the IBM Lotus Forms product McINTYRE: Okay, David, you know, paper forms cost more than organizations think. You know, a single paper form costs between $30 and $165 to use, enter, process and then retain through records retention. You know, $22.5 billion alone are spent on preprinted forms in the US alone. And some 30 percent of preprinted forms are wasted. So let's take a look at the real cost of paper. It's the paper. It's the printing. It's the copying, faxing, mailing, courier, storage and disposal. For a typical 100-person office, it's about $447,000 according to analysts. How does the Lotus Form software help in automate this processing? Let's start at refocusing your staff. If you capture information in a form, it's a much more efficient way of capturing data. The focus is placed on the information that you're trying to capture in the context that you're capturing it in. You're accelerating transactions, right. When you do automate the input of these forms, there's not transcription errors or spelling mistakes, et cetera. You're inputting the information directly into the system. You're increasing your IT flexibility because you're streamlining and automating forms in a business process type way. You're feeding the IT business processes. And then finally, you're growing customer loyalty. You know, the information that they put in and validate is the information that they see from the back end systems when they finally get the order back to confirm them. -2- You know, if we take a look at what Lotus Forms and the form architecture provides, at the presentation layer it's pixel perfect for duplicating paper forms. There's business logic where you can capture forms and processes inside the form. The form can build dynamically based on the input that's given to it at one given time. The data instances are based on open standards like WC3CX forms and multiple XML tables can be used for integration. The file attachments. Let's say you're an insurance adjustor. The ability to attach a picture of the collision as you go through the adjustor process... right, the ability to add file attachments. And then finally, within [Lotus] Forms there's also a digital signature capability. DUTCHER: How does Lotus Expeditor software augment this capability? McINTYRE: It can help in a couple of areas. IT or application developers may want assured and secured delivery of forms to business processes, regardless of network connectivity -- with little or no coding. They may also want the ability for assured messaging to take the form and the form data offline and then synchronize upon return to the network. End users want to improve their responsiveness through an interface that aggregates forms on the client desktop with a wide variety of applications and enables interoperability between those applications. IT calls this function “composite application.” This is where Expeditor shines. It aggregates forms inside the composite desktop. The form application can be integrated in with Web applications and Java™ applications. Once on the desktop, the form and the form data is captured, and then the end user has the capability of doing automatic synchronization of that form and form data with the back-end server. This can assist in delivering the robust and security-rich messaging capability which takes the form and the form data to the back-end server. Expeditor augments this at three levels. The first level is at the interaction layer -- Web -3- applications, [Microsoft] ActiveX® components from Microsoft, [Microsoft] Visual Basic®, et cetera. SWT from an Eclipse™ , portal based applications. Expeditor has enhanced interaction for the end user to make forms applications a part of the composite desktop. Secondly, Expeditor has access middleware integrated inside it: data management for JDBC access to relational databases, object oriented database, Web services access through the Web Services Descriptor Language or SOAP, and security for Web services. It also has transactional forms and forms data synchronization using JMS and the micro broker capability inside Lotus Expeditor On top of the interaction and access layers, we have a management layer. The ability to deploy, maintain, update and remove forms and forms data from the client-side application. You know, we're extending these applications out to the edge of the network to desktops, laptops and tablets. The ability to do forms on these types of devices. DUTCHER: Angus, can you outline the runtime architecture? McINTYRE: Certainly. You know it's a client/server type orientation that we have here. Let's start on the server. The Expeditor server is used in conjunction with the forms server. The forms server is storing the forms and the forms data. And then the servlet controlling the capability to create, read, update and delete those forms and then search, et cetera, the forms that are within the forms database. Connecting that to the client is MQE, right. MQE is used to pre-populate the form out to the client for offline use and then as the client comes back online take the form and the form data and use assured messaging to get that back up through the forms server and the forms database. Now let's take a look at the client side of the application here. We mentioned that Expeditor has a composite application desktop. So you would have the Lotus Expeditor client. Inside that client is a Web container. The Lotus Forms viewer is viewed as a Web container object so it runs as any browser based plug in would run inside the Expeditor -4- environment. Locally on the client you would have a server, servlet that enables you to search and sort forms. You would store those locally within a relational data store which is, can be encrypted locally on the client. And then as we had mentioned before, as the form gets taken offline it's used and it's populating that local database. Then as it reattaches MQE is used to take the form and the forms database and synchronize it back to the server. DUTCHER: Can you explain the steps in building the application? McINTYRE: Sure. First of all you get a business analyst to design the form. So you would use the Lotus Forms Designer tool. In this you create the end user look and feel of the form, what it looks like to the end user and capture which data elements you want stored in the back end systems. From there you get a templated form that you would turn over to a Java application developer. They would create a servlet that enables the create, read, update and delete --or the CRUD -- for the forms on both the client and the server. CRUD on the server to do search and sorting and retrieving from the forms database. And on the client to do searching and sorting locally when it's taken offline. You would use a local JDBC call on the client to store the forms and the forms data locally. In this way you can take the form offline and populate the database while you're disconnected from the network. Finally, you would use MQE calls through JMS to synchronize both the form and the forms database. Two ways you need to do this: first of all to populate the client with the forms before they take it offline; and secondly, to synchronize the forms and the forms data upon reconnection, reconnection to the server using the assured messaging capabilities. And the network awareness that's within Lotus Expeditor. DUTCHER: Okay, now we've got a clear picture of the architecture and how to build. What's the use case for taking forms offline? -5- McINTYRE: Let's take an auditor in the field as an instance of this. You know, the auditor would be essentially going into a customer's site and may not have connectivity. They would need the ability to work offline while they were at the client site and then come back in and synchronize the forms submission at the end of the day. So the auditor would essentially select the forms that they want to take offline and then they would select the form to open. The Expeditor would retrieve the form from the local database. The auditor would fill that in and submit it. If they were offline, the completed form would be saved in the local MQ queue and then message queues are replicated asynchronously. As they come back online, the message queuing stored on the client side with the form and the forms data is automatically synchronized using assured messaging with the server side. The form is then parsed and persisted to the server side database and the forms database on the servers. DUTCHER: How is this being used in real life? I mean, what are the advantages that are gained by putting both products on a laptop for mobile users? McINTYRE: Well, we're finding a pattern in this space. You know, the customer needs the ability for people to take forms offline and create and edit and submit the forms while they're offline for later synchronization. They want to easily integrate forms with business processes be it, you know, Active X controls, Visual Basic applications, et cetera. And they want to use forms inside composite applications. You may want to pre-populate a form with information out of a completely separate application and Expeditor provides that through the property broker. You know, the value proposition offered by this is accelerating business processes through more flexible forms use anytime, anywhere. We're noticing uptake in government, insurance, banking and compliance, more like auditing of both within the financial and within the retail sector. You know, one specific one, a retail customer of ours, essentially has a compliance -6- where they go out to their manufacturing sites for clothing. And they take the form offline and they go through the employment compliance. So they go through it and audit the manufacturing site. And then they come in at the end of the day and they resynchronize the form. So the use case here is they want compliance with manufacturing policies, the compliance officer starts the day, they synchronize the forms and the forms data to the laptop or the tablet. They go visit a manufacturing plant which may not have access to the network, they fill out the form on the laptop or tablet and then they store in the local encrypted database. They then go back online at the end of the day and they synchronize the form and the forms data. To close on this David, audit forms are submitted offline and then synchronized with enterprise information systems, automatically as that client system reattaches to the network. It's this type of assured messaging that gets forms filled out and then forwarded to the place that they need to be in the business process. DUTCHER: Expeditor? Angus, what type of tools are we recommending for use with Lotus McINTYRE: Well, we mentioned the forms tool in terms of the Forms Designer. That can be used to create the forms and the forms data. To take these forms offline you really need a Java™ IDE or any Eclipse 3.2 toolset such as Rational® Application Developer. You know the Expeditor toolkit plugs into any Eclipse 3.2 IDE. [Editor’s note: The Eclipse community is an open source community committed to the implementation of a universal development platform.] We've been tested with other visual building software such as Instantiations® WindowBuilder™ Pro, but I must reiterate, if you're going to do this type of offlining of forms, Expeditor is really aimed at IT shops that have Java and or Eclipse skills. Now these aren't hard to find since the Eclipse has been downloaded over 60 million times and the analysts estimate that there's over 2.6 million Eclipse developers. -7- DUTCHER: Angus, where can our listeners go to get more information? McINTYRE: They can either visit ibm.com/lotus/mobile or they can contact their Lotus sales representative. They can also join us for the three remaining podcasts which are Taking WebSphere Applications Offline with Lotus Expeditor, Mobile Applications with Lotus Expeditor and finally, Lotus Expeditor as an Open Alternative to Microsoft .NET [Framework]. DUTCHER: Thanks Angus, very informative. And thanks to those of you listening to the podcast today. Please remember to visit us at ibm.com/lotus/mobile and plan to join us for the other podcasts in this series. Thanks. [END OF SEGMENT] -8-