Frequently asked questions

Products

Q. What is Ecstra Business Palette?
A. Ecstra Business Palette is a ground-breaking set of graphical client applications that provide an extraordinary level of productivity by allowing business people to work in a visual and intuitive way with concepts and data. Ecstra Business Palette would be a valuable diagramming tool in it own right, but because it is integrated with a metadata-driven web/enterprise content management system it allows for "deep models" where each element in a diagram represents a database object of some sort. This results in a uniquely powerful environment for structuring and sharing ideas, information and processes.

Q. What sort of ideas can you model with Ecstra Business Palette?
A. Web-enabled diagram-based information systems ("deep models") have already been built in the following domains:

Stakeholder analysis
Scenario management
Balanced scorecard
Cause and effect analysis
Performance management, key performance indicators
Business rules management
Project management, dependency/critical path analysis, PERT, CPM
Workflow, business process and activity models
Use case design, dataflow analysis
Object class models, data models, entity-relationship models, database design
CRC (Class-Responsibility-Collaboration) interaction
Screen design, web page layout
Organisation structure charting
Functional decomposition
Website architecture, screen flow diagrams

Current R&D projects are exploring applications in areas including linguistics and the pricing of financial derivatives.

Any type of content that is stored in Ecstra's data repository - in other words, any kind of data - can be shown in an Ecstra Business Palette diagram.

In addition, Ecstra Business Palette is appropriate for drawing any kind of diagram where shapes are connected by lines, and these connections need to be maintained when a shape is moved.

Technical infrastructure

Q. What are the technical requirements for Ecstra?
A. Ecstra runs on Windows, Unix, Linux or any other J2EE-enabled platform. To install the server components you will need

a Java servlet container such as JRun, Tomcat, JBoss, Resin, Jetty, Oracle AS, Websphere, Weblogic
a relational database management system (RDBMS) - SQL Server, MySQL and Oracle are currently supported.

An ASP.NET version is currently under development with release scheduled for December 2005.

To use the client components, you need a web browser such as Internet Explorer 5+ or Firefox. Ecstra Business Palette also requires Flash player 6+.

Q. But I thought Ecstra runs on ColdFusion?
A. Yes, Ecstra also runs on ColdFusion, even if CF is installed in "standalone" mode, because ColdFusion can run JavaServer Pages.

Q. Is Ecstra a Windows solution or an Open Source solution?
A. You can run Ecstra on Windows, IIS and SQL Server with a servlet engine. Alternatively, you can run it on Linux, MySQL and one of the open-source servlet engines mentioned above. Naturally the ASP.NET version is a Windows-only option.

Q. Why isn't Ecstra itself open-source?
A. Because we are interested in forming commercial relationships with the organisations that use it.

Q. Why does Ecstra Business Palette use Flash? That contradicts your stated commitment to standards.
A. Yes, it is an exception to our general rule. In fact, we started by using SVG for some of the functionality, and Ecstra continues to provide an SVG-based option. However, the fact is that most people have Flash installed, and most people don't have an SVG player installed and configured. Also, Flash allows us to provide an integrated high-performance framework for realtime multi-user collaboration, which is not really possible with SVG.

Q. These "server components" you mention - do I need to install them or will it work without them?
A. If you go for a hosted solution, then you don't need your own server at all.

Interfacing capabilities

Q. Does Ecstra support "portlets"?
A. Ecstra Enterprise provides a native Java interface to the content repository. Note that web front-ends can also access the content repository programmatically via the web services interface.

Q. Does Ecstra support WebDAV?
A. Ecstra Enterprise can be configured to work hand-in-hand with WebDAV on your server. In this case, Ecstra will use the web server's WebDAV locking mechanism instead of its own. This will allow you to save documents directly to the server from desktop applications. Ecstra will detect that the documents have been uploaded and record their details in the content repository.

Q. Does Ecstra support Active Directory or LDAP?
A. Ecstra Enterprise supports both of these via Java JNDI technology.

CMS philosophy and functionality

Q. There are thousands of CMS to choose from - what's different about Ecstra? Give me a business-related answer.
A. Ecstra acknowledges that "content" does not exist in isolation from the rest of your business. In our opinion, the very word "content" is suspect. Does the word "content" feature in your organisation's business plan? More likely, you use information and resources, make plans, send and receive messages. Ecstra integrates all of that into a web-enabled management system for the agile enterprise. In practice, this means that Ecstra includes and extends the functionality of some features that are only found in a few CMS, such as a graphical workflow builder and a graphical site architecture visualiser, and includes others which are usually not considered part of a CMS at all, such as an interactive data modeller, a project management module, instant messaging and whiteboards.

Q. There are thousands of CMS to choose from - what's different about Ecstra? Give me a technical answer.
A. In Ecstra, data is content. You can manage and define the data using graphical tools. Processes also can be data, and can also be managed using graphical tools.

Q. No, give me a really technical answer.
OK, you asked for it. Some of Ecstra's fundamental principles are:

1. Strict separation of information structure, document structure, website structure and presentation. The resulting complexity is visualised using familiar metaphors such as folders, and user-friendly graphical modelling tools.

2. Application of extensible metadata to any object using inherited profiles based on metadata standards such as Dublin Core, and the use of this metadata to drive a powerful data integration and knowledge management framework.

3. Application of workflow, versioning, permissioning and internationalisation to any object.

4. Integration of management tools which automatically track progress and provide status alerts.

Q. Give me some idea of what Ecstra is like to work with in practice.
A. The Ecstra user interface presents a familiar-looking hierarchy of folders with some pre-defined parts.

The Content folder contains your actual information, marked up text and structured data. Optionally associated with each Content subfolder are its Item Profile and its Workflow. Each of these is inherited but optionally overridden by each object in the folder.

The Sections folder contains your publications, such as websites. Optionally associated with each Content subfolder are its Item Profile and its Workflow. Each of these is inherited but optionally overridden by each object in the folder.

Defining the content of a given section, as presented to a given device, is a matter of assigning content objects to the areas in the section's template. Ecstra provides the ability to associate either a single content object, or a content folder, with each area. If a folder is used, then Ecstra will select one or more items from the folder for inserting into the area depending on rules you set.

The Groups folder contains details of all the individuals, departments and generic user types who may use Ecstra itself, or websites built with it.

The Workflows folder contains named sets of stages through which a content object may pass.

The Item Profiles folder contains object class definitions.

The Metadata folder contains basic definitions of metadata elements, object types and "taxons" (elements in a hierarchy or network of related concept definitions). These can be user-defined. We also provide some useful prebuilt metadata and taxonomy folders, for example the GCL (UK Government Category List) and elements from Dublin Core, the eGMS (UK Government Metadata Standard) etc.

Q. Does Ecstra provide WYSIWYG web page editing functionality?
A. Yes, by providing the ability to integrate various WYSIWYG editors. But this is not part of the product's core functionality. If you want a WYSIWYG web page editor, we recommend Dreamweaver or similar.

Q. Does Ecstra let end-users enter HTML "tag soup"?
A. By default, yes. But if you want to prevent that, there is a powerful feature for specifying optional validation rules for content. You can use this to specify a specific subset of XHTML that is allowed, or you can disallow all HTML.

Q. Does Ecstra provide in-page editing? Do I have to log in to a separate application to edit my website?
A. In-page editing is a feature normally associated with simplistic CMS which do not distinguish between content structure and web site structure but have a one-to-one relationship between a piece of content and the page where it is displayed. The normal way of working in Ecstra is to log in to Ecstra separately. However, the Preview Section interface does allow you to achieve a similar effect if desired.

Q. Does Ecstra have a personalisation capability?
A. Yes.

Q. Is Ecstra a CRM system?
A. Ecstra's personalisation system allows you to collect information about the interests and requirements of individual customers. On the basis of that information, it helps you customise the online experience for visitors to your site. The information is easily accessible for further analysis.

Q. Is Ecstra a native XML CMS?
A. XML has always played an important part in Ecstra. Ecstra is a suitable storage repository for XML documents. Ecstra can validate XML documents, find contents within them, apply XSL transformations to them, and publish them in various XML formats such as XHTML or RSS. However, Ecstra uses a relational database to store all metadata about content.

Q. Does Ecstra store content at a granular level or at a document level?
A. Although Ecstra certainly can and does store documents, its power largely derives from its very granular data model. The objective is to provide a "single store" repository for content which can be re-used in multiple formats. As anyone who's tried it will attest, that requires a very granular data model.

Q. It is possible to bulk-upload documents?
A. Yes - you can zip up your documents and upload one zip file. Ecstra will unzip it and create the appropriate folder structure.

Q. What about structured data - can I bulk-upload that?
A. You can upload structured data, such as spreadsheet data, by defining an Item Profile which corresponds to the spreadsheet's structure and then uploading it as a text file. Ecstra will store each cell of the spreadsheet as a metadata record.

Q. Does Ecstra support metadata?
A. Yes, extensible metadata is one of the keystones of Ecstra.

Q. Does Ecstra support workflow?
A. Yes, configurable workflow is another keystone of Ecstra.

Q. Can I edit images online with Ecstra?
A. Yes, Ecstra has a built-in online image editor with 15 image transformations such as scale, crop, rotate, margin and colour transform.

Q. How does Ecstra deliver content to a website?
A. Ecstra's primary focus is on managing your content. There are four different ways you can use Ecstra in its delivery:

Use Ecstra's built-in delivery system. This allows you to take full advantage of the personalisation, search, forms and internationalisation features.
Build your own presentation layer using a scripting language such as JSP, ColdFusion, PHP or VBScript, which fetches data from the repository using the API. This gives total flexibility.
Use the simple client-side pull interface to add include content from the Ecstra repository (your own installation or ours) in your website.
Use the Ecstrax API to build highly functional web applications with desktop-style functionality which communicate asynchronously with the Ecstra server using "AJAX" techniques.

Q. Can I drag and drop files into Ecstra?
A. If you are using Ecstra in conjunction with WebDAV you can drag and drop files into the repository.

Q. Does Ecstra serve its content "baked" or "fried"?
A. It can do either - it depends which delivery mechanism you choose and how you organise your content.

Q. Does Ecstra support multiple languages?
A. Yes, this has been built into Ecstra from the beginning.

Q. Does Ecstra do spell checking or translation?
A. Both of these are handled by a web services architecture that allows you to "plug in" third-party services. Out of the box, Ecstra comes with integration to a couple of free services.

Q. Does Ecstra support the creation of email newsletters using the formatting, styles and assets defined for the website?
A. Yes.

Q. Why is Ecstra called Ecstra? Can't you spell?
A. It's an acronym for Electronic Content Syndication and TRAnsformation. These days, of course, Ecstra does a lot more than that.

Standards

Q. What content syndication standards does Ecstra support?
A. RSS. Also, a client pull mechanism is available.

Integration with other components

Q. What WYSIWYG editors are supported?
A. Ecstra has been successfully integrated with fckEditor (a JavaScript solution) and eKit (a Java applet).

Q. What search engines are supported?
A. Ecstra has been successfully integrated with Lucene and Verity.

Q. What XML parsers are supported?
A. Currently Ecstra uses the Xerces parser.

Q. What XSLT processors are supported?
A. Currently Ecstra uses Xalan.

Q. How does Ecstra generate PDF output?
A. Using FOP.

Evaluating and buying Ecstra

Q. How can I evaluate Ecstra?
A. Contact us to arrange a demonstration. If you like what you see, you can sign up for a hosted service, which is free for the first month.

Q. Why don't you provide a downloadable evaluation copy?
A. Because we want to ensure that only genuine customers have access to the code.


	Frequently asked questions Products Q. What is Ecstra Business Palette? A. Ecstra Business Palette is a ground-breaking set of graphical client applications that provide an extraordinary level of productivity by allowing business people to work in a visual and intuitive way with concepts and data. Ecstra Business Palette would be a valuable diagramming tool in it own right, but because it is integrated with a metadata-driven web/enterprise content management system it allows for "deep models" where each element in a diagram represents a database object of some sort. This results in a uniquely powerful environment for structuring and sharing ideas, information and processes. Q. What sort of ideas can you model with Ecstra Business Palette? A. Web-enabled diagram-based information systems ("deep models") have already been built in the following domains: Stakeholder analysis Scenario management Balanced scorecard Cause and effect analysis Performance management, key performance indicators Business rules management Project management, dependency/critical path analysis, PERT, CPM Workflow, business process and activity models Use case design, dataflow analysis Object class models, data models, entity-relationship models, database design CRC (Class-Responsibility-Collaboration) interaction Screen design, web page layout Organisation structure charting Functional decomposition Website architecture, screen flow diagrams Current R&D projects are exploring applications in areas including linguistics and the pricing of financial derivatives. Any type of content that is stored in Ecstra's data repository - in other words, any kind of data - can be shown in an Ecstra Business Palette diagram. In addition, Ecstra Business Palette is appropriate for drawing any kind of diagram where shapes are connected by lines, and these connections need to be maintained when a shape is moved. Technical infrastructure Q. What are the technical requirements for Ecstra? A. Ecstra runs on Windows, Unix, Linux or any other J2EE-enabled platform. To install the server components you will need a Java servlet container such as JRun, Tomcat, JBoss, Resin, Jetty, Oracle AS, Websphere, Weblogic a relational database management system (RDBMS) - SQL Server, MySQL and Oracle are currently supported. An ASP.NET version is currently under development with release scheduled for December 2005. To use the client components, you need a web browser such as Internet Explorer 5+ or Firefox. Ecstra Business Palette also requires Flash player 6+. Q. But I thought Ecstra runs on ColdFusion? A. Yes, Ecstra also runs on ColdFusion, even if CF is installed in "standalone" mode, because ColdFusion can run JavaServer Pages. Q. Is Ecstra a Windows solution or an Open Source solution? A. You can run Ecstra on Windows, IIS and SQL Server with a servlet engine. Alternatively, you can run it on Linux, MySQL and one of the open-source servlet engines mentioned above. Naturally the ASP.NET version is a Windows-only option. Q. Why isn't Ecstra itself open-source? A. Because we are interested in forming commercial relationships with the organisations that use it. Q. Why does Ecstra Business Palette use Flash? That contradicts your stated commitment to standards. A. Yes, it is an exception to our general rule. In fact, we started by using SVG for some of the functionality, and Ecstra continues to provide an SVG-based option. However, the fact is that most people have Flash installed, and most people don't have an SVG player installed and configured. Also, Flash allows us to provide an integrated high-performance framework for realtime multi-user collaboration, which is not really possible with SVG. Q. These "server components" you mention - do I need to install them or will it work without them? A. If you go for a hosted solution, then you don't need your own server at all. Interfacing capabilities Q. Does Ecstra support "portlets"? A. Ecstra Enterprise provides a native Java interface to the content repository. Note that web front-ends can also access the content repository programmatically via the web services interface. Q. Does Ecstra support WebDAV? A. Ecstra Enterprise can be configured to work hand-in-hand with WebDAV on your server. In this case, Ecstra will use the web server's WebDAV locking mechanism instead of its own. This will allow you to save documents directly to the server from desktop applications. Ecstra will detect that the documents have been uploaded and record their details in the content repository. Q. Does Ecstra support Active Directory or LDAP? A. Ecstra Enterprise supports both of these via Java JNDI technology. CMS philosophy and functionality Q. There are thousands of CMS to choose from - what's different about Ecstra? Give me a business-related answer. A. Ecstra acknowledges that "content" does not exist in isolation from the rest of your business. In our opinion, the very word "content" is suspect. Does the word "content" feature in your organisation's business plan? More likely, you use information and resources, make plans, send and receive messages. Ecstra integrates all of that into a web-enabled management system for the agile enterprise. In practice, this means that Ecstra includes and extends the functionality of some features that are only found in a few CMS, such as a graphical workflow builder and a graphical site architecture visualiser, and includes others which are usually not considered part of a CMS at all, such as an interactive data modeller, a project management module, instant messaging and whiteboards. Q. There are thousands of CMS to choose from - what's different about Ecstra? Give me a technical answer. A. In Ecstra, data is content. You can manage and define the data using graphical tools. Processes also can be data, and can also be managed using graphical tools. Q. No, give me a really technical answer. OK, you asked for it. Some of Ecstra's fundamental principles are: 1. Strict separation of information structure, document structure, website structure and presentation. The resulting complexity is visualised using familiar metaphors such as folders, and user-friendly graphical modelling tools. 2. Application of extensible metadata to any object using inherited profiles based on metadata standards such as Dublin Core, and the use of this metadata to drive a powerful data integration and knowledge management framework. 3. Application of workflow, versioning, permissioning and internationalisation to any object. 4. Integration of management tools which automatically track progress and provide status alerts. Q. Give me some idea of what Ecstra is like to work with in practice. A. The Ecstra user interface presents a familiar-looking hierarchy of folders with some pre-defined parts. The Content folder contains your actual information, marked up text and structured data. Optionally associated with each Content subfolder are its Item Profile and its Workflow. Each of these is inherited but optionally overridden by each object in the folder. The Sections folder contains your publications, such as websites. Optionally associated with each Content subfolder are its Item Profile and its Workflow. Each of these is inherited but optionally overridden by each object in the folder. Defining the content of a given section, as presented to a given device, is a matter of assigning content objects to the areas in the section's template. Ecstra provides the ability to associate either a single content object, or a content folder, with each area. If a folder is used, then Ecstra will select one or more items from the folder for inserting into the area depending on rules you set. The Groups folder contains details of all the individuals, departments and generic user types who may use Ecstra itself, or websites built with it. The Workflows folder contains named sets of stages through which a content object may pass. The Item Profiles folder contains object class definitions. The Metadata folder contains basic definitions of metadata elements, object types and "taxons" (elements in a hierarchy or network of related concept definitions). These can be user-defined. We also provide some useful prebuilt metadata and taxonomy folders, for example the GCL (UK Government Category List) and elements from Dublin Core, the eGMS (UK Government Metadata Standard) etc. Q. Does Ecstra provide WYSIWYG web page editing functionality? A. Yes, by providing the ability to integrate various WYSIWYG editors. But this is not part of the product's core functionality. If you want a WYSIWYG web page editor, we recommend Dreamweaver or similar. Q. Does Ecstra let end-users enter HTML "tag soup"? A. By default, yes. But if you want to prevent that, there is a powerful feature for specifying optional validation rules for content. You can use this to specify a specific subset of XHTML that is allowed, or you can disallow all HTML. Q. Does Ecstra provide in-page editing? Do I have to log in to a separate application to edit my website? A. In-page editing is a feature normally associated with simplistic CMS which do not distinguish between content structure and web site structure but have a one-to-one relationship between a piece of content and the page where it is displayed. The normal way of working in Ecstra is to log in to Ecstra separately. However, the Preview Section interface does allow you to achieve a similar effect if desired. Q. Does Ecstra have a personalisation capability? A. Yes. Q. Is Ecstra a CRM system? A. Ecstra's personalisation system allows you to collect information about the interests and requirements of individual customers. On the basis of that information, it helps you customise the online experience for visitors to your site. The information is easily accessible for further analysis. Q. Is Ecstra a native XML CMS? A. XML has always played an important part in Ecstra. Ecstra is a suitable storage repository for XML documents. Ecstra can validate XML documents, find contents within them, apply XSL transformations to them, and publish them in various XML formats such as XHTML or RSS. However, Ecstra uses a relational database to store all metadata about content. Q. Does Ecstra store content at a granular level or at a document level? A. Although Ecstra certainly can and does store documents, its power largely derives from its very granular data model. The objective is to provide a "single store" repository for content which can be re-used in multiple formats. As anyone who's tried it will attest, that requires a very granular data model. Q. It is possible to bulk-upload documents? A. Yes - you can zip up your documents and upload one zip file. Ecstra will unzip it and create the appropriate folder structure. Q. What about structured data - can I bulk-upload that? A. You can upload structured data, such as spreadsheet data, by defining an Item Profile which corresponds to the spreadsheet's structure and then uploading it as a text file. Ecstra will store each cell of the spreadsheet as a metadata record. Q. Does Ecstra support metadata? A. Yes, extensible metadata is one of the keystones of Ecstra. Q. Does Ecstra support workflow? A. Yes, configurable workflow is another keystone of Ecstra. Q. Can I edit images online with Ecstra? A. Yes, Ecstra has a built-in online image editor with 15 image transformations such as scale, crop, rotate, margin and colour transform. Q. How does Ecstra deliver content to a website? A. Ecstra's primary focus is on managing your content. There are four different ways you can use Ecstra in its delivery: Use Ecstra's built-in delivery system. This allows you to take full advantage of the personalisation, search, forms and internationalisation features. Build your own presentation layer using a scripting language such as JSP, ColdFusion, PHP or VBScript, which fetches data from the repository using the API. This gives total flexibility. Use the simple client-side pull interface to add include content from the Ecstra repository (your own installation or ours) in your website. Use the Ecstrax API to build highly functional web applications with desktop-style functionality which communicate asynchronously with the Ecstra server using "AJAX" techniques. Q. Can I drag and drop files into Ecstra? A. If you are using Ecstra in conjunction with WebDAV you can drag and drop files into the repository. Q. Does Ecstra serve its content "baked" or "fried"? A. It can do either - it depends which delivery mechanism you choose and how you organise your content. Q. Does Ecstra support multiple languages? A. Yes, this has been built into Ecstra from the beginning. Q. Does Ecstra do spell checking or translation? A. Both of these are handled by a web services architecture that allows you to "plug in" third-party services. Out of the box, Ecstra comes with integration to a couple of free services. Q. Does Ecstra support the creation of email newsletters using the formatting, styles and assets defined for the website? A. Yes. Q. Why is Ecstra called Ecstra? Can't you spell? A. It's an acronym for Electronic Content Syndication and TRAnsformation. These days, of course, Ecstra does a lot more than that. Standards Q. What content syndication standards does Ecstra support? A. RSS. Also, a client pull mechanism is available. Integration with other components Q. What WYSIWYG editors are supported? A. Ecstra has been successfully integrated with fckEditor (a JavaScript solution) and eKit (a Java applet). Q. What search engines are supported? A. Ecstra has been successfully integrated with Lucene and Verity. Q. What XML parsers are supported? A. Currently Ecstra uses the Xerces parser. Q. What XSLT processors are supported? A. Currently Ecstra uses Xalan. Q. How does Ecstra generate PDF output? A. Using FOP. Evaluating and buying Ecstra Q. How can I evaluate Ecstra? A. Contact us to arrange a demonstration. If you like what you see, you can sign up for a hosted service, which is free for the first month. Q. Why don't you provide a downloadable evaluation copy? A. Because we want to ensure that only genuine customers have access to the code.