ISS Due DiligenceProject Sophia

27 November 2008

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Managing Distributed Content – Improved Execution

Challenge: Accelerate and optimise the course content execution of web-based training courses from

remote office PCs connected over a bandwidth limited WAN

Two Available Solutions: Castify EBN (third-party solution)

Predistribute content to the remote offices and serve the learners directly from the office LAN

While content can be served locally for best performance, dynamic data such as learner progress must still be updated centrally in LSO

Castify offers course content distribution with its LSO integration modules for Castify Enterprise Broadcast Network, including a dynamic proxy that resolves user-specific requests to serve content to the individual user

SAP NetWeaver AccAD Accelerated Application Delivery has integrated cache with caching patterns Efficient compression mechanisms On the application server, commodity tasks and processes can be offloaded Follows software appliance approach – preconfigured and fast to install and setup

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Required Components for Castify EBN

Centralised Castify EBN Network Operation Centre (NOC), which controls all remote content caches, and maintains a consistent global view on the status of EBN

A standard SQL database used by EBN NOC to persist configurations and status of EBN. Database server can be shared with other applications

Distributed C-Routers which distribute content within EBN and integrate the content server modules for the remote office learners

Castify SAP LSO Integration Modules which run on the C-Routers to serve SAP LSO content to the learners

Castify SAP LSO Content Ingestion module to acquire automatically the content from the central LSO platform and distribute this content to the remote C-Routers

Castify EBN Manager which is a Java application to configure and monitor the Castify EBN solution and all remote C-Routers

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What Does it Look Like?

Traditional Centralised LSO Implementation

Decentralised LSOImplementation

Using Castify EBN

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Transmission Times for Large Files in Typical TCP Environment

Castify EBN resolves latency issues – content delivered by C-Routers are always based on local

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Application Aware Caching with SAP NetWeaver AccAD

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Example Using SAP NetWeaver Portal Knowledge Management

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Application Aware Caching Mechanisms

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Gaps

These two approaches – Castify (caching) and SAP NetWeaver Accelerated Application Delivery (caching and compression) – allow distributed content for the purposes of faster execution

Neither solution addresses the concern of distributed authoring, and synchronisation of distributed content repositories (CMS)

SAP Product Management statement:

If Linklaters have a scenario, where those "pushes" of content are heavily requested and the current way of working is not sufficient, then we would be happy to look into the implementation and work together on an improved behaviour for the next version

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Clarification of Web Services

Motivation for Web Services in LSO Without Web Services, learning content would all have to be checked in via SCORM interface

and played via Learning Solution’s Content Player With Web Services content can stay unconverted and played using original content player of

content provider

SAP training administrators can use web services to create and manage courses in third party system without leaving the Learning Solution interface

Web Services available: Fetch course catalog from external service provider based on search criteria Add new course to catalog from external provider Change course details in catalog from external provider Delete course in catalog from external provider

More info at https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/wiki?path=/display/ESpackages/HCM%252bEnterprise%252bLearning

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Integration with Microsoft Collaborative Suite

Integration ScenarioCourse Enrollment

Integration ScenarioLearning Progress

Knowledge Provider Knowledge ProviderKnowledge RequestorSAP LSO

Knowledge RequestorSAP LSO

CourseEnrollmentRequest

CourseAccessUrlQuery

CourseEnrollmentCancellation

Request

CourseEnrollmentCancellationConfirmation

CourseAccessUrlResponse

CourseEnrollmentConfirmation

LearningProgressResponse

LearningProgressQuery

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Thank you!