The OpenText Process Suite ABC Glossary - Collaborative Workspace (CWS) part 1

Collaborative Workspace

With the OpenText Process Suite (OTPS) platform, business analysts, designers and developers are working together in a single integrated development environment, called the CWS (Collaborative WorkSpace) or short workspace. In the workspace the developer creates a project to contain all the relevant components to build an OTPS platform application. 

The CWS supports the management of the complete application development cycle, starting from its inception until delivery of the packaged application. All components that are created and implemented with the project are packaged into a CAP (Cordys / Composite Application Package) file. This file contains the run-time components only and is used for deployment that is installing the application on any next OTPS platform instance to test, or accept and to finally put in the application in the production environment.

DTAP

While developing with the OTPS platform, you will apply a phased approach to the environment for application development, testing and deployment, i.e. DTAP (Development, Testing, Acceptance and Production). You start with design and development of the process model(s) and their components in a Development environment. When ready, the application is deployed in a Test environment to test whether it works as expected. If the test is successful, the application is deployed in an Acceptance (test) environment, where a number of key users test whether the application meets their expectations. If they accept, the application is deployed to a Production environment.

With the OTPS platform, the full application development cycle consists of 4 phases:

1. Qualify and analyse

Business users and business analysts are analysing the business problem and qualifying the business case. The business case and scenario can be illustrated by means of an “As is” business process model representing the current situation.

2. Design and model

In the second phase, business users, analysts can work together with software architects to design the optimised “To be” business process model(s). Typically, these are high level business process models comprehensible to the business users. The processes serve next as a starting point for the design of the technical process models and their implementation in the next, third phase.

3. Develop and deploy

OTPS platform developers will design and implement the technical business process models by developing the necessary OTPS platform components such as web services, user interfaces, decision tables, etc. to the effect of making the modelled processes executable. Both design and development is done within a single project defined in the workspace.

4. Run and monitor

When the project and the implementation have reached maturity, the project and its contents are packaged into an application package file. Next, the application is deployed in the production environment. Business users run the processes, while the business analysts monitor the process performance and the administrator administers the application, the running or completed process instances.

With respect to the DTAP environment, phase 1, 2 and 3 are applied within a Development environment, while step 4 is applied initially in the Test, next Acceptance and finally Production environments. Thus design and development of the application is limited to an isolated Development environment only.

Business analysts, process designers and developers use the CWS to collaborate on the design of the process models and development of the necessary OTPS platform components to make these processes executable. This is done within the context of a project defined as the starting point of the OTPS application.

List of abbreviations

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