X-Color QC Enterprise Edition White Paper

Transcription

1 X-Color QC Enterprise Edition White Paper Some of the best kept secrets within our company are the features and benefits of the Enterprise Edition of X-Color QC. But all of that is about to change! Enterprise capabilities include: Centralized data repository that can service multiple locations and multiple X-Color QC clients Real time data updates to ensure accurate and consistent color data between processes and manufacturing sites Access management over a global database by group or location Supervisory control over permissions, functionality, and user experience Centralized control and management of Standards, Tolerances, Reports, Jobs, and Viewsets Further benefits include: Eliminates the need for proprietary network protocols, such as Citrix or MS Terminal Services, reducing implementation costs and unnecessary license fees. Enterprise Level operation that uses a true web service architecture for the optimum convenience Connections to distributed or network databases are not limited to VPN Supports a variety of database architectures including Java s embedded Derby for stand alone systems, Microsoft SQLServer, MySQL, and Oracle The Enterprise Client can connect to multiple databases provided there is a valid access to a LAN, WAN, or internet pathway to the database xrite.com

2 Many current color quality control systems need to operate within a network and with information that needs to be shared and distributed among a variety of users and locations. The challenge is to consistently meet these requirements while maintaining control over data and user rights. X-Color QC Enterprise Edition provides a solution that allows any number of locations to easily communicate and share data across an enterprise. In addition to typical color data [Standards, Samples, etc.], X-Color QC s unique database design stores a variety of user defined objects. These objects include report formats, Jobs, Tags, system settings, and screen layouts. Depending on permissions, and regardless of who originally created them, these objects are available to all X-Color QC users connected to the database. What this means is that IT Associates can create custom reports and QA Managers can prepare Jobs that are immediately available to all users throughout the Enterprise. Within an X-Color QC Enterprise system, a supervisor can create user roles, users, and groups. These user management functions allow supervisory control over user rights and permissions, provide supervisors with the ability to hide controls and functions for specific users, and manage access to a global database. Default screen layouts, or Viewsets as they are called within X-Color QC, can be assigned to individual users. These associated Viewsets provide a controlled user experience and will be automatically displayed whenever the user logs in to X-Color QC. Another unique feature is Data Groups. Data Groups are used to easily organize and manage color data within the global database. You can think of Data Groups as being analogous to file folders on your PC. Users can create and nest Data Groups hierarchically, to any level, and use them to organize their Standards and Samples. Tolerances can be assigned to Data Groups and these tolerances are automatically inherited by any Standards added to the group. To manage data access, Data Groups can also be associated to User Groups. If a particular User Group is associated to a Data Group, only the members of that User Group will have access to the Data Group and all other users will be locked out. As an example of what this all means, take a company [say, Acme Supplier] that produces colored products at multiple locations and supplies those products to multiple specifiers. Each of these specifiers will have their own unique sets of standards and specifications. An Acme X-Color QC supervisor can create Data Groups to hold each individual specifier s standards along with their specific tolerances. Within Acme, individual production groups can be associated to the Data Groups appropriate for the products they are producing. IT or QA Supervisors can create the Jobs [procedural workflows], reports, and display configurations required to produce, monitor, and approve product. Storing these objects within the central enterprise database makes them immediately available to all X-Color QC users throughout the company. QA/QC associates and Product Managers will have the information they need in the formats they require to make critical product decisions, allowing them to resolve color issues more quickly and with increased efficiency. Using a combination of CxF [X-Rite s open Color Exchange Format] and X-Color QC s multiple legacy data exchange options, color data is easily exchanged with Specifiers resulting in shorter approval times and reducing time to market. Superseding all of this, X-Color QC s

3 unique enterprise architecture provides an overarching framework that allows centralized control over the data users can see, how they see it, and what they can do with it. The figure below illustrates just one of many ways X-Color QC can be configured throughout a company s enterprise. When this enterprise architecture is combined with the procedural automation available with Jobs, X-Color QC provides the Industry s most complete solution for capturing accurate color data, organizing it automatically for efficient analysis, and making it available to the people who need it in the formats they require for quick decision making. At the heart of X-Color QC is the most contemporary database and enterprise architecture available within any current X-Rite software product. X-Color QC Enterprise Clients connect directly to the Enterprise server through standard HTTP protocols typically used throughout a company s IT infrastructure. X-Color QC has been architected for both vertical and horizontal scalability. The architecture takes advantage of a standard 3-tier client-server approach to better facilitate the more traditional peer-to-peer architecture of some of our legacy X-Rite products. The design is such that when additional database and application servers are added the systems performance will continue to improve and be more efficient. Whether scaling vertically, adding additional processors and RAM to the server to increase the performance and overall bandwidth throughput of the system, or horizontally, adding users [clients] or data to the database, the system will continue to perform optimally.

4 An important attribute of the X-Color QC architecture is extensibility. Extensibility is the ability to design a system that can continue to be built upon for future growth. A modular approach for adding features has been a design goal since day one. The idea of modules being added, and those modules being priced and offered in separate bundles, is a key implementation feature of the product. This extensible approach was built into the product early on to help make the product more maintainable over time and to avoid early obsolescence. Although X-Color QC is not completely built from the ground up on a true Service Oriented Architecture [SOA], its web service like architecture does indeed take advantage of various web services to communicate between the database and application object layers. All of the necessary components; server software, web servers and application server software are self-contained within the X-Color QC Enterprise Edition Install. Thus this is a very low maintenance approach designed to minimize the amount of IT input needed to implement and maintain this solution. By using RPC [remote procedure calls] based capabilities, X-Color QC s design and architecture is a self-contained enterprise application that takes advantage of the remote connection capabilities of Spring to manage enterprise objects within the application. Some of the advantages of this approach include ease of use, configuration, deployment and lower ongoing maintenance. An example of client request for data from the server via Spring Remoting is displayed below:

5 The underlying database architecture and schema are expandable to manage multiple wavelengths of information. X-Color QC will continue to evolve towards needing to collect additional data to better understand and define texture, shadowing, and other visual appearance type characteristics used to best describe the perceived visual aspects of a material. We also use Object Relational Mapping (ORM) technology from Hibernate on the back-end of our application to help us facilitate the storage and retrieval of domain objects via object/relational mappings. This helps the application abstract the database layer from the application, thus avoiding direct access to vendor specific database solutions that we support in X-Color QC. The Database Object Model (DOM) and Application Object Model (AOM) work in conjunction to easily manage data across an enterprise. The X-Color QC platform has been designed and developed for maximum flexibility, meeting both the current needs of our customers and those that will emerge over the lifetime of the product. As technology changes; and it will, X-Color QC s contemporary architecture is expansible to support additional database engines [such as MySQL, INGRES, etc.] and newer operating systems. Owing to the significant investment in time, money, and resources required to setup enterprise wide solutions, customers need to have confidence in their technology decisions. X-Color QC is X-Rite s most future proof quality control solution, one that brings value now and in the future. X-Rite World Headquarters Grand Rapids, Michigan USA (800) xrite.com 2010 X-Rite, Incorporated. All rights reserved. (05/10)