Step Ahead: Authentication in the Matrix!

A little while back one of our customers, Matrix Education, expressed a desire to improve the security and protection of their rather sophisticated intranet based enterprise management software. To this aim we discussed integrating our entity management system into their web based intranet application.

Our entity management system is a powerful role based system that allows the management and authentication of entities including users, actors, organizations etc., It comes with a powerful, intuitive web based user interface to allow easy creation and management of entities and such as users and their roles and 'access rights'. Our separate workflow management system plugs right into the entity management system for customers who want to manage processes within their organization efficiently and automatically.

The customer understood that integrating our well established 'off the shelf' user management and authentication framework would provide a more reliable, high quality and less expensive alternative than building such a system from scratch.

Yesterday, after only a few days effort we completed the integration of our entity management framework into their system so now their web based enterprise system has modern, powerful user authentication built seemlessly into their existing JSP based application. The use of our access managing servlet filter allows us to hook into the 'smarts' of our entity management framework from just about any Java based web application including those built with servlets, JSP, Tapestry, Wicket and even Echo.

pagebloom's Media Asset Manager shines!

Motivation
About this time last year ago we conceived an idea to enhance our pagebloom enterprise content management system (ECMS) to help manage the media assets (images, Flash intros etc.,) for the websites that it hosts. The idea was to create an advanced and powerful auto replicating media asset management system that could serve images from the most appropriate media host chosen from a range of available media hosts located around the world. That system was implemented and integrated with the pagebloom hosting service earlier this year.

How it works
If a particular host goes down or is under high traffic then the media assets can be served from alternative media hosts - all without site visitors experiencing any negative affects from the loss of performance on the degraded or lost media server.

Concept payback!
Since the integration of the new media asset manager none of the media hosts have experienced any problems, luckily. Well that was until today! And pagebloom carried forth without a problem. The US based media server that went down was removed from the list of available servers and media assets for pagebloom hosted sites were transparently retrieved from alternative media hosts - all without site visitors noticing any problems. From the perspective of a software engineer it truly was a thing of beauty! We're all very satisfied and proud at how well our design was able to keep the pagebloom ECMS working perfectly even though a key component of the system was not available for a period of time.

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This blog is where we'll keep you up to date with all the news and happenings, product releases and product updates of Step Ahead Software.

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