Fractal Conceptual Prototype: Active Behaviors

© Fractal Conceptual Prototype: Active Behaviors Edwin Simpson, Guillaume Belrose, James Rutherford HP Laboratories HPL-2009-66 content management. ECM, cloud applications, collaboration Fractal is a research project that seeks to develop on-demand content management as a service, specialising in helping users in different organisations to collaborate. This report describes part of our conceptual prototype, a working system developed to help clarify our vision and understand today's content management platforms. It demonstrates the key ideas of a multi-tenanted content management service that is extensible and allows rapid adoption and customisation. This report introduces the idea of Active Behaviors, a technology that allows users to add and compose functionality for content processing, viewing, managing human tasks or interacting with other cloud services. External Posting Date: April 6, 2009 [Fulltext] Approved for External Publication Internal Posting Date: April 6, 2009 [Fulltext] Copyright 2009 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. Fractal Conceptual Prototype: Active Behaviors Edwin Simpson Guillaume Belrose James Rutherford edwin.simpson@hp.com guillaume.belrose@hp.com james.rutherford@hp.com This report and its accompanying video [1] introduce the concept of Active Behaviors within Fractal, a research project seeking to develop a heavily customizable content management service for HP. Active behaviors are a mechanism for extending a content management system with new functionality that can respond to user activities, changes to content or other events. This functionality may coordinate human tasks with automated processing tasks performed by other cloud-based services, reducing the amount of repetitive manual tasks for a user. End users can add active behaviors to the content management service within a workspace belonging to a team, project, or task, known as a Content Space[4]. By accessing this functionality from the context where content is stored and managed, users need not move content manually between applications and services they wish to apply to it, so content management and security policies can be enforced. To visualize some of our ideas and identify technical challenges around topics such as active behaviors we constructed the conceptual prototype featured in this report and the accompanying video. The prototype is not a real, finished version of Fractal, but it demonstrates the key ideas of a multi-tenanted content management service that is extensible using active behaviors, allowing rapid adoption and customization by end users. This report describes and example active behavior from the point of view of an end user, showing how business users can incorporate active behaviors into everyday project work. The accompanying video provides a similar explanation with a screencast of the demonstration [1]. Additional Materials In [2] we discuss the technology used to produce the conceptual prototype, which was based around current technologies. Here we also give reasons why cloud-based content management services require entirely new technologies. Figure 1: Core parts of Fractal and their relationships The conceptual prototype visualizes several key ideas in Fractal. Besides active behaviors, we explored content spaces [4] and the extensions marketplace [5], a service used to exchange and discuss extensions such as active behaviors. Figure 1 illustrates the high-level connections between these components. In [3] we expose our vision of the whole of Fractal and reviews relevant literature and technical challenges.