TIBCO

TIBCO Collaborative Information Manager

TIBCO Collaborative Information Manager™ software provides a comprehensive approach to managing information within your organization and synchronizing it across your value chain. Collaborative Information Manager ensures that your product data is consistent, complete, clean, and accurate throughout your entire organization.

Key features include:

CIM Components
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  • Rich, extensible information repository with powerful capabilities to maintain complex intra and inter-catalog relationships, multiple taxonomies, and validation rules
  • Pre-packaged, industry-specific, best practice collaboration templates to enable business users to rapidly and efficiently manage enterprise information
  • Out-of-the-box, flexible information synchronization capabilities adhering to industry standards (e.g. global data synchronization) internally and across the value chain
  • Information search, reporting, and auditing capabilities

Loosely Coupled Product Architecture

The Collaborative Information Manager application is designed in a loosely coupled manner with well defined, standards-based interfaces between internal components. Industry templates are built on top of data domain specific logic that relies on five core application components to power the solution. Abstracting these layers allows for a highly flexible and scalable offering that can be quickly configured to meet customer requirements. Collaborative Information Manager software supports multiple strategic data domains (product, customer, vendor, etc.) from one platform.

The web user interface is entirely metadata-driven, so screens are dynamic and contextual. Information is passed back and forth between the engine and UI components as XML; hence it is easy to swap out Collaborative Information Manager screens and embed custom rich-client interfaces right into the application using tools such as TIBCO’s Ajax-based product TIBCO General Interface™.

Cross-Domain Relationships: The power of being able to manage multiple domains of information from a single platform is truly realized by the ability to create cross-domain relationships based upon rules. For example, a customer record in a customer catalog can have a relationship to the products that the customer buys from the company. Or a product could be tied to a vendor or a region or a promotion. For many organizations, the relationships between their data domains is almost as valuable as the data within the domain itself. For example, for an organization to optimize their supply chain they need to know where products are sourced and which customers they typically get shipped to. Being able to model these relationships and enforcing rules and validations across these relationships is extremely valuable to many organizations.

High Performance

Collaborative Information Manager makes intelligent use of caching and parallelization of work across multiple threads to process, load, and publish large amounts of information very quickly. This is essential in data-intensive industries such as financial services, telecom, and energy. TIBCO also provides best practice guidance on achieving optimal performance such as structuring the data model and relationships, instrumenting activities in the workflow, and executing activities in an asynchronous manner.

Web Services

Application functionality - to the level of querying and updating the structure of the master catalog, adding or modifying records, firing a business process, querying and submitting work items within a business process - is exposed as web services. This makes it easy for customers to use their own custom UI outside the application to call Collaborative Information Manager services or embed Collaborative Information Manager services as part of a larger composite application. Both functional and highly granular web services are provided out-of-the-box, so customers have a great deal of flexibility in accessing and controlling Collaborative Information Manager functionality from outside the application.

Standards

Collaborative Information Manager is a completely standards-based Java EE web application with a zero-client footprint. It is event-driven, providing a great deal of flexibility and control over information management processes. Access rights and ownership of data is roles-based and can leverage existing LDAP systems. Business processes and associated rules are stored as XML and can be modified via the application UI or directly by a developer. Communication with the outside world is done over standard protocols such as FTP, JDBC, web services, XML over JMS, or AS/2.