Overview

Anthology Inc. enables customers to integrate products such as Anthology Student and Forms Builder. Customers can leverage investments made into existing products and at the same time gain immediate value for investments in next generation products that will feature a unified architecture and data model.

An event-driven architecture using tools like Microsoft Visual Workflow integrates existing products with a service bus that customers may have already implemented at their institutions to synchronize data between systems. Workflow empowers users to easily write code to do specific tasks currently not available in existing products or tasks that involve exchanging data between systems. Anthology Web Services are available to facilitate inserting data back into the existing systems.

Scenario
A student updates her phone number in Anthology Student Portal. In the current architecture, the update will be propagated into Anthology Student. With Workflow, the update event can be saved onto the service bus and other database systems deployed at the institution (e.g., CRM Constituent Management System, LMS Learning Management System, and POS Point of Sales) will be updated automatically.

The key objectives of Workflow are:

• Ease of use
• Greater flexibility for the implementation of business processes
• Greater flexibility for the integration with other systems

Workflow uses out-of-the-box .NET functionality such as:

• Security
• Logging and Instrumentation
• Localization/Globalization
• Component Model (Inversion of Control/Dependency Injection Framework)
• Caching

The Event Broker and Workflows components provide the extended business functionality.