Success Stories

Spago for Italian Ministry of University and Research

Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research has chosen Spago to implement the Registry of the Scholastic Buildings. The project goal is to realize a registry containing all information about buildings and scholastic centers with regional and national scope, assuring the information consistency between the regional nodes and the central node. An important feature of the application is the availability of database “local instances” with the dynamic change of the data model structure. This option allows to dynamically extend the database with new information types with the possibility to define, for each new information type, the type check to perform by integrating external systems registered in the database. Some important features of the application are the following:

• application portability on all operating systems, application server and RDBMS
• database information customization for regional nodes
• data synchronization between regional nodes and central Ministry by SOAP services.

The main architectural requirement of the application is the independence from the hw/sw environment: thus it can be distributed to the different regional departments, with no technological constraints. So, the design, by means of a full open source java frameworks, grants the technical compatibility with every J2EE application server and every RDBMS. The application, when released, has been certified in the following environments:

• Operating System: Microsoft Windows; Unix, Linux, Sun Solaris
• RDBMS: Microsoft SQL/Server, IBM UDB, ORACLE, Mysql;
• Application Server: JBoss, IBM WebSphere, Application Server SUN ONE.

Ministry of Historical Heritage, State Archive in Catania – Portal for the Historical Multimedia Archive of the Mediterranean area

Engineering has implemented - using eXo Portal - a new tool with the aim to support workers in historical researches. The portal contents deal with the Italian Historical Archives and with the Archives of the Mediterranean area as well. This portal, for the first phase of the project ending in June 2007, will give access to about 60.000 digital documents containing up to 240.000 digital images. Users will retreive all documents using a search tool specifically designed for historical research purposes and for the enhancement and spreading of the Historical Archives. The contents are classified by means of a knowledge management tool using a specific taxonomy definition, indexes and thesauri. Portal information will be available in six different languages: Italian, English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Hebrew, while historical contents will be available in their original language (e.g.: Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, French, Vulgar, Sardinian, etc.). The application has been realized through the use of a mainly open source environment (JBoss application server, eXo Portal, Engineering SCF for the Content Management System, Oracle RDBMS for content indexing and multi-language thesauri). User interface is compliant to the requirements of the Italian accessibility law (Legge Stanca). The portal will be on-line at the beginning of 2007.

DIGEAC Project of Veneto Region Adopts Spagic as SOA/BPM Middleware of the New Integration Platform

The DIGEAC Project of Veneto Region handles the management of various processes coming both from external and internal applications, such as payment orders, Identity Access Management, digital signature, documents conservation, treasury services. To this end a new integration platform using Spagic as SOA/BPM middleware has been realized. This platform is compliant with CNIPA (Italian governmental agency) Interoperability guidelines.

The main requirements in the definition of the architecture have been: reliability, robustness, high service availability and performances. Spagic improves the efficiency of all the actors involved in integration processes: architects, developers, system and services managers.

Spagic provides the following advantages:

• adoption of an open source SOA/BPM Integration Platform to implement CNIPA Interoperability guidelines;
• reuse of services already present in IT Veneto Region;
• an easy integration of all applications by means of the visual tool Spagic Studio;
• a single interface managing the entire infrastructure.

SpagoBI in Emilia Romagna Region - DWH for the monitoring of the regional labour market

SpagoBI is the platform chosen by Emilia Romagna Region to develop the monitoring model for the regional labour market, starting from data provided by the local information systems.
Analysis are focused on the following working situations:

• employment (start, termination, transformation, extension of the job relationship)
• redundancy
• unemployment.

The information distributed in the nine districts is collected by means of an ETL process, which fills up the regional data warehouse.

Thanks to the virtual portals enabled by eXo Portal (the open source portal environment developed by eXo Platform SARL) and by means of a careful behavioural model coded into SpagoBI, it's possible to restrict the access of every single district to its own logical Data Mart. The SpagoBI analytical model allows both the design of standard analyses used by all the districts and the design of customized ones.

The BI Portal is accessible from the Intranet of Emilia Romagna Region.

Spago in Emilia-Romagna Region - Agricultural Activities

Emilia-Romagna Region has selected the Spago Framework for the development of several projects. One of these is the Regional Information System for Agricultural Activities with the purpose to supply an IT support to the technical-administrative activities. Main goal of the project has been the implementation of a unique company register in which all of the agricultural companies active in the Region Emilia-Romagna are subscribed. All the services available are directly connected with the regional registry via web. Local civil employees can use these to carry out the main administrative procedures (query of the procedures, authorizations, controls).

All the applications are configured in high reliability on a IBM WebSphere application server and Oracle database. Some web services have been developed for applicative cooperation with other components, e.g. for the integration of the company register with the different administrative procedures.

eXo Portal, ECM and JCR in Venice (Italy) – Venice District Portal and PoloEst news

Engineering has implemented using eXo Platform the new Venice District portal in Italy also containing news and contents of PoloEst, an on-line community around the District. The project development has been carried out with success using eXo Portal and for the very first time the new eXo ECM and eXo JCR components. The full integration of the ECM and JCR components within the portal has enabled the developers to effectively fulfill the requirements of a complex organization. The application has been realized through the use of a full open source stack (Linux Debian, Apache, Tomcat, PostgreSQL, eXo Plaftorm), so matching the goals of the IT department of the Venice District previously giving a preference for open source software. The portal is accessible at: www.provincia.venezia.it

Veneto Region – Portal for Tourist Activities

The Portal for Tourist Activities of Veneto Region, developed by Engineering, provides highly interesting tourist contents, information about accomodation, suggestions on how to choose tourist products, and services for tourist operators. The application has been developed using a full open source infrastructure: JBoss application server, eXo Portal server, Engineering SCF Content Management Server. User interface is compliant to the requirements of the Italian accessibility law (Legge Stanca). The portal is accessible at: www.veneto.to

Spago in Veneto Region – The Regional Information System

Spago framework has been used to realize the SIRV (Information System of Veneto Region). In the last four years about 20 projects with different characteristics and size have been developed for both citizens web access and Administration access via intranet. Main projects are:

• Anagrafe- Farm Registry
• Fitos - Management of phytosanitary certificates
• Decreti – Management of digital decrees
• Modello Unico – Management of contributions to agricultural

activities

• Stag – Statistics for agricultural activities
• MapGeis – Management of sporting facilities
• Web Library
• Prosedit - Regional Publishing

Citizens and local civil and public employees can reach all the public information via web and use all the services to carry out the main administrative procedures (query of the procedures, authorizations, controls).

SpagoBI in Veneto Region – A DWH to support management policies of Veneto Region

The aim of the Veneto Region was to provide itself with an infrastructure to extract, transform and load data in order to feed datawarehouses and specific datamarts for analysis and reports. Looking for the technological solution, the Administration paid special attention to open source software solutions choosing in the end SpagoBI, the Business Intelligence platform. The application has been realized using a full open source stack; in fact, in addition to SpagoBI, operating system Linux RedHat, application server JBoss and DBMS PostgreSQL have been used. The first study case was the development of a tool to support fiscal policies programming. The Data Warehouse is fed by an ETL process computing about 3,500,000 individual income tax returns each year, supplied by the Administration provider. Since the aim of the analysis is to provide statistics to the decision-makers, the ETL process divides personal and tax information and aggregates it into five dimensions (age, income amount, sex, residence, income type), allowing a detailed analysis of regional tax incomes in Veneto Region, using OLAP cubes, reports and georeferential maps.

The BI Portal is available on the Veneto Region intranet.

SpagoBI for SGAR Midi-Pyrénées – LOLF: managing the financial indicators

ALTIC, the French open source software integration company, has implemented using SpagoBI a new application for SGAR Midi-Pyrénées (Public Administration Sector). The goal of SpagoBI LOLF is to manage the performance indicators of the administration. Under the European directives and the new financial law (LOLF: Loi organique relative aux lois de finances), the French administration must manage and follow the expenses and the budget with the performance indicators. Since these indicators do not always exist in information systems of the enterprises, it is necessary to create an interface to extract and to load the information from the administrative system and also, to design some screen to input the data to calculate the indicators. The advantage of the SpagoBI solution is the web portal interface allowing about 350 users to input data and to see their indicators.

SpagoBI in Mindscape - Sales Datamart

Smile, a French IT company specialized in projects based on open source software has deployed SpagoBI for Mindscape, a leading editor of Casual video-games. SpagoBI allows top managers to analyse figures and dashboards based on the sales datamart.

Data is extracted from the corporate ERP, aggregated with data from other information systems, and several calculation are performed to obtain new figures and analyses.

The business intelligence portal with SpagoBI includes financial  reports performed with BIRT, hypercubes based on Mondrian/JPivot, and a security management to authorize users to access only to their data.

SpagoBI for the Tourism – DWH Supporting a Virtual Incoming Agency

The scope of the portal developed by Engineering and eBMS-ISUFI is the realization of an Integrated Touristic System to aggregate the different actors involved in the touristic use of the territory. The reference model is the Virtual Incoming Agency, where various actors facilitate the touristic and cultural valorisation, attracting new flows and supporting the tourism companies in promoting their own services. This project consolidates the results of research projects of Engineering and eBMS-ISUFI, such as Teschet, MAIS, PMTT, Extendo.

The complex of distinctive and specific attractive factors (natural, socio-cultural and artificial) is made available by a local offer system (a sum of resources, activities and actors), found in a homogeneous and integrated environment, even located in different regions. This environment is determined by the clients' perceptions and oriented to create value for the different stakeholders (first of all the tourist, the local tourism industry, the hosting community as well as the international tourism industry and the local authorities).
The main categories of actors interfacing the Virtual Incoming Agency are:

• the tourists;
• the agencies: suppliers of tourist services;
• the enterprises: specially the regional and local touristic companies, that are the main target of the Virtual Incoming Agency, because of their role in the coordination and promotion of the local touristic offer.

Given the context, the scope of the project is also to facilitate the interaction between typical Business Management arguments and Information and Communication Technologies topics, in order to realize a system able not only to offer services but also to elaborate qualifying strategies to improve the services offered by a certain territory or productive system. Engineering and eBMS-ISUFI identified SpagoBI as the suited platform to realize the analytical component to support the strategic decisions.

The analysis are focused on:

• Tourism Dashboard: "Demand's Dashboard" (to analyse the tourist type present in a certain touristic destination), "Supply's Dashboard" (to analyse the touristic companies, both from an entrepreneur managerial ability point of view and from the quality of offered services point of view), "Customer's Satisfaction Dashboard" (to measure the satisfaction/dissatisfaction level of the tourists that spent some days in a particular destination) and "What If Analysis" (to analyse tourists' spending in order to study the spending behaviour);
• Territory Analysis: to analyse the territory in order to get all the useful information (as cultural, historical, social, infrastructural) to be used for the creation of homogeneous offer areas;
• Master Plan: the planning process for the touristic development of the destination.

Spago in Tirrenia – Passengers and Goods Booking

Engineering has implemented by means of Spago two new applications for the Italian company Tirrenia di Navigazione S.p.A: Passengers Booking and Goods Booking. The first one is designed to handle the passengers’ booking offices in the ferry ports and in the travel agencies, while the second one handles the goods traffic. The applications are both installed on a IBM WebSphere application server with Oracle RDBMS, all systems configured for high availability. Passengers Booking is running on a IBM AIX cluster, while Goods Booking is running on a Microsoft Windows cluster. In addition to the standard Web interface accessible from Internet/Intranet, some WebServices has been developed to allow the commercial Tirrenia partners to integrate their applications with the new platform, using the Spago facilities.

The FrontOffice application is accessible by Internet for private customer and travel agencies (http://www.tirrenia.it following the link “Prenota o acquista il tuo biglietto on-line”), while the BackOffice application is reachable only by Intranet.

eXo Portal in Engineering – Collaborative Portal of the Research & Innovation Division

The collaborative portal of its Research & Innovation Division has been the first portal development carried out by Engineering using the eXo Portal open source infrastructure. In this way Engineering has both achieved a good knowledge of the infrastructure and verified its adequacy in a real-world case. Many components and applications are integrated in the portal, as wikis (XWiki), RSS feed, links to other company web sites and applications of corporate collaboration, document and knowledge management.

SpagoBI for LemonOLAP – The statistical tool for LemonLDAP

ALTIC, the French open source software integration company, has implemented using SpagoBI the analytical tool for LemonOLAP. LemonOLAP provides a log parser based on regular expressions permitting to scan all kinds of logs. It is used with LemonLDAP, a webSSO that centralizes all requests from users to Web Applications, playing different roles : user authentications, access authorizations and secure data transfer (encryption via HTTPS). LemonLDAP is already used by 200.000 users everyday in the French Public Administration (e.g.: Gendarmerie, Ministry of Finance). Since it is possible to define analysis axis to explode logs facts in a central and unique database, LemonOLAP provides a unique place where system administrators can follow all their information systems activities. SpagoBI easily presents reports, graphics, olap analysis and query based on the LemonOLAP database.

Spago BI for the Healthcare. Budget Cards for ASL3 of Turin (Italy)

ESEL company, of the Engineering Group, supplier on the market of Healthcare and Local Public Administration, has used SpagoBI at ASL 3 of Turin (Italy) for the innovation of the distribution system of the budget cards towards all the operative units of the hospital garrisons and territorial districts, enriching these with detailed information on the allocated services and carried out admissions. The solution imposes a significant behavioural model for outlining the users of various sections (Management and Quality Control, Informative System, Operative Departments and Units and Enterprise Management) and diversifying by role the portal environment, the analytic documents available, the data made visible. The developed analytic base covers with various analyses (OLAP, reporting, QbE) all the economic dimensions and evolves towards the garrison detailed information regarding the services and the admissions.

AUSL Cesena (Italy) Adopts Spagic for the Management of Its Healthcare Processes

By means of the VENUS project, the AUSL Cesena (an Italian Public Healthcare company) has realized a platform able to design, develop, monitor and manage the healthcare processes in order to integrate approximately 20 applications that relate, on TCP/IP protocol, HL7 messages, following the prevalent message communication standard used in the healthcare sector.

The guidelines in the definition of the architecture have been: reliability, robustness, high service availability and performances. By means of Spagic it has been realized a SOA/BPM integration platform compliant with "EDI" HL7 architecture model, that improves the efficiency of all the actors involved in integration processes: architects, developers, system and services managers.

Spagic provides the following advantages:

• adoption of an open source solution as SOA/BPM Integration Platform;
• the same component (HL7) exposed by different interfaces and protocols (HTTP/SOAP, TCPIP, FILE, FTP, JDBC);
• easy integration of all applications by means of the visual tool Spagic Studio;
• availability of all information present in HL7 message by Spagic Enterprise Monitor;
• one interface for the entire infrastructure;
• security mechanisms availability.