iWay Service Manager What Is New in TPM 9.1

[Corneliu Chirnoaga]

TPM 9 comes up with a new set of cool features and improvements that target usability, performance, data coherence, and data transfer flexibility. TPM 9 is substantially improved based on our customers' needs and experience, on our observation and understanding of TPM use patterns, as well as through adopting newer industry standards. TPM continues as we speak to go through an evolutive process whose goal is to provide a better experience on all areas of concern.

Modernized Architecture and UI for Better Performance and Usability

• Dramatically improved the ease of accessing data.
• Now data can be entered following a more natural flow providing relevant contextual information.
• There are several concepts we borrowed from the programming world leading to a better conceptualization of the stored data.
• Great strides were made in improving the server performance and eliminate data incoherence.

            

  

Improved Support for More Complex Scenarios

• The new TPM is geared to fulfill complex customer use scenarios like data loads, data transfers between different system etc.
• This is an area where we made significant improvements and continue to do so with a number of cool features implemented or being implemented as we speak.

REST APIs for Automation Management

• a good number of APIs was introduced, and this number continues to grow to support different scenarios like automation of more complex scenarios,
• the REST APIs are meant to be used by any TPM REST client, and perhaps the most important so far is iSM, which until recently had direct access to the TPM database iSM being the de facto TPM server for most of the uses cases.
• with the advent of the new TPM server and the TPM REST API exposure, many operations are, and will be possible without the need to intimately know the internal structure of the TPM database, thus forcing the business rules check on the server side rather than on the client/caller side. The end effect is a huge increase in the usability, shifting of concerns on the business purpose TPM would solve in a ecosystem rather than data migrations.
• REST APIs also makes TPM a perfect candidate as a microservice with easy integration in cloud ecosystems.

            

Improved Export/Import

The core of import/export became one of the cornerstone features of the new improved TPM:

• It is used to accomplish a number of features that increase the ease of use from both UI and API Automation perspective.
• Imports, besides the fact that are checked, can now update existing data domains and, if desired, synchronize them. For instance, transport of data from one TPM system to another is greatly simplified.
• New import/export can be done in a very discrete way, allowing insert/update/delete operations not only on individual elements, but whole hierarchical data sets.
• New import is also optimized for performance allowing import of very large data sets in a greatly reduced time and memory requirements.
• This feature continues to grow as we speak based on our understanding of the product utilization and practical use cases which are triggered by actual customer requirements and practices. In this sense we are open to any suggestion that can lead to substantial product improvements.

            

Initial Database Load. Custom Database Changes

TPM provides a new mechanism to run SQL scripts each time the TPM server starts. Here are some scenarios that can be covered using this mechanism:

• initial custom database load for situations where the database needs to be primed with a custom set of predefined data tailored for specific setups. For instance, when you plan to distribute TPM on multiple machines, or to multiple customers, where you have a predefined set of metadata types, standards, formats, message type, systems etc. This will preclude the need to manually enter the data (an thus human error) for every single distribution. Of course, such scenario could also be covered using the import feature with a predetermined set of import data packages.
• any custom database changes can be applied as needed. For instance, you want to apply a database wide change (could look at this as a data patch), like renaming certain objects, enhancing the set of existing metadata types, removing some properties or objects etc. This mechanism would help to automate such processes in situations where your routing engine along with the TPM server is distributed to multiple clients.

        

 

Metadata Extensibility

While previous versions of the product provide a domain/type extension mechanism, the new TPM improved on this concept by allowing definition of named custom sets of properties to extend the default domain property set. The new approach can cover new scenarios where almost every entity in the system can have an identity that attaches specialized meaning thus helping in a complex system with the separation of concerns. For instance, now a Partner may not just be "any partner", but through type extension it can be seen as a partner whose function is suggested and supported by the extension type assigned to it.

 

         

 

Metadata Quick Preview

The new TPM brings an improved way of visualizing the relevant custom metadata properties by eliminating the need to drill down into the entity itself. This mechanism can offer a synoptic view of multiple entities custom metadata greatly improving the user experience.