1. What is a business service?
2. What is a composite application?
3. What are the steps associated with implementing a composite application?
4. What is service-oriented integration?
5. What types of business situations can be improved with Above All’s composite application assembly and deployment platform?
6. What solutions benefit from the assembly of composite applications?
7. Who uses the Above All Composite Application Platform?
8. Do Above All products require Web services?
9. Do Above All products generate Web services?
10. How do I populate my SOA Repository with services?
11. What are the technology requirements and prerequisites for the Composite Application Platform?
12. How does Above All handle security?
13. How can I integrate my Business Process Management (BPM) solution with Above All?

1. What is a business service?

Business services are Web services that more suitably and correctly represent a reusable business construct. Business services have the following characteristics:

	They are described in terms used by the business (e.g. customer, back order item, inventory availability, etc.).
	They represent functionality that is optimized for business use (by hiding development-level details).
	They are business typed (a price is represented as a currency rather than as a decimal).
	They can be composed of multiple services in order to relate directly to the business purpose (an order with more comprehensive product information to assist customer service).

Business services align IT resources to business requirements.  Because business services are fit for the business purpose, they are easier to combine and orchestrate together to support business needs.

2. What is a composite application?

A composite application is a transactional application comprised of business functionality and data from one or more enterprise sources, deployed into a single interface.  With their user-oriented focus, composite applications are designed to assemble the tasks and information necessary to improve users’ effectiveness.   Because composite applications can more easily integrate multiple systems together, they remove the boundaries created by application silos and thus efficiently support cross-functional business processes. 

3. What are the steps associated with implementing a composite application?

There are four steps in the implementation of a composite application:  Mine, Refine, Assemble, and Deploy.  

	Mine:   The examination, cataloging, and automatic refinement of an information source in an enterprise into business services available in the Above All SOA Repository.
	Refine:   The process of semantically and behaviorally enriching objects and services into reusable business services.
	Assemble:  The process of aggregating multiple business services into a composite application.
	Deploy:  The process of exposing business services and/or composite applications for use outside of the Above All Studio environment.

4. What is service-oriented integration?

Service-oriented integration is how Above All approaches composite applications.  It is achieved by mining and refining information assets into a set of business services.  Business services are the first level of service-oriented integration.   Further integration occurs when business services are assembled together into composite applications.  Because service-oriented integration is non-invasive to existing applications, it offers a faster, more flexible, and more cost effective approach.

5. What types of business situations can be improved with Above All’s composite application assembly and deployment platform?

Composite application assembly and deployment with Above All can be used to solve a wide variety of business problems. 

	Business users need more complete, interactive access to functionality and data to complete their business tasks. With Above All, a business can assemble and deploy a composite application that aggregates and integrates all of the services and information required.   The result is a 360 degree, interactive application that streamlines business tasks.  One example is a composite application that delivers the functionality that builds and updates a complete history of a customer’s interaction with an organization.
	Business users need simplified access to a small portion of the full functionality provided by an enterprise application.  Rather than incur the expense required to license and train these users on the enterprise application, a composite application offers just the functionality they need via a familiar user-oriented interface.   Above All Knowledge Packs quickly mine and automatically refine the data and services from the enterprise application into business services for use in Above All Studio.
	Business users can benefit from a more functional, modern user interface to legacy applications to improve their efficiency.  Composite applications can deliver legacy functionality via a user-oriented interface.  Above All Studio provides the automatically generation of user-interfaces for existing services and the further customization of those interfaces for a variety of deployment clients.
	Business users need additional, integrated functionality for their enterprise applications.  Composite applications integrate related functionality from other systems and deliver it embedded within the enterprise application user interface.  Utilizing enterprise application extensions, Above All Studio generates composite applications for deployment clients that can be easily embedded into the user interfaces of the enterprise application.
	The services available are not useful as building blocks for integrations and composite applications.   Traditional middle ware technologies don’t offer the refinement capabilities necessary to semantically align and integrate disparate systems.
	The services available need a user-interface.  Above All can automatically generate a user interface based on the characteristics of the service.  Using relationships and data typing, Above All eliminates many of the manual user interface creation tasks required by a traditional development environment.
	Alignment and reuse is an important goal in a service-oriented architecture investment.  Above All’s four step methodology to composite applications focuses on alignment and reuse.  Above All Studio supports the semantic and business alignment essential for the assembly of composite applications.  Both business services as well as composite applications become reusable compositions in Above All, raising reuse to the level of compositions.  All of the metadata created in Above All is available for reuse from the Above All SOA Repository.

6. What solutions benefit from the assembly of composite applications?

The benefits of composite applications can be seen in every industry, across functional domains.  Front-to-back office integration and mobile access to enterprise services represent two areas where customers have achieved immediate value from composite applications. In front-to-back office solutions, businesses integrate customer relationship management systems (such as Siebel or salesforce.com) with their financial, order management, inventory, and/or help desk systems.  These solutions deliver automation and enhancement of existing sales or service processes.  In mobile solutions, businesses deliver task-based, transactional access to customized composite applications.  Beyond simple enablement of enterprise applications for mobile devices, composite applications deployed to mobile devices can deliver the same higher value, integrated services that make road warriors more effective.

7. Who uses the Above All Composite Application Platform?

There are three primary types of users for our products:

	Domain experts and architects.  They use Above All Studio to understand and refine the semantics, relationships, and transformations between dissimilar services.  All of the valuable semantic information added during refinement is stored and available for reuse from the Above All SOA Repository.
	Application developers and business analysts.   They use Above All Studio to refine the base services into business services fit for the business use and to assemble these business services into composite applications.  Because Studio provides an intuitive, visual user interface, staff with a wide range of skills can take advantage of its easy-to-use yet powerful capabilities.
	Business users.  They use the composite applications assembled and deployed with the Above All Composite Application Platform.

8. Do Above All products require Web services?

Above All products leverage Web services when they are available, but do not require Web services to mine information assets.  Though we designed the Above All products in anticipation of the wide adoption of Web services, we understand that such adoption will take time.   We also understand that Web services may never be defined for certain systems.  In addition, we realize that Web services do not offer the richer metadata available through more direct system access.  For this reason, Knowledge Packs are available not just for Web services but for other common legacy interfaces such as ODBC, JDBC, and database stored procedures.  In addition, enterprise application Knowledge Packs go beyond Web services to mine the customer-specific metadata available in the enterprise application itself.   Because Web services are becoming an important interface to systems, the Above All Composite Server supports the publishing  of services in the Above All SOA Repository as WS-I compliant Web services.

9. Do Above All products generate Web services?

Yes.  The business services created with Above All Studio can be published to our Composite Server as WS-I compliant Web services.  Through our Knowledge Packs and Composite Server, we can also transform technologies such as stored procedures and ODBC calls into Web services. 

There are many other products available for wrapping and publishing as Web services existing software components such as J2EE programs.  This capability is both inexpensive to acquire and fast to accomplish.  Above All complements these products.

10. How do I populate my SOA Repository with services?

Knowledge Packs provide the mechanism for populating the SOA Repository with services from your existing systems.  Knowledge Packs are available for a variety of information sources including but not limited to:  Web services, ODBC, Oracle Stored Procedures, and popular enterprise applications.  Knowledge Packs glean a deeper level of metadata about their systems, organize, and automatically refine it into business services.  Metadata developed by the Knowledge Packs are stored in the SOA Repository.

11. What are the technology requirements and prerequisites for the Composite Application Platform?

Above All Studio, which supports the refinement of services and the assembly of business services into composite applications, runs on Microsoft Windows-based machines.  Deployed composite applications can be accessed in variety of client environments including Windows rich client, Web pages, and mobile devices.  In addition, composite applications can be embedded inside enterprise applications (that support user interface extension) using web or ActiveX technologies.  The Above All SOA Repository runs on Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Enginer (MSDE), or a local file system.  Above All Software leverages the existing software assets within your organization.    Knowledge Packs reach your critical information assets such as enterprise applications, data sources, and Web services. 

Above All Software works equally well with .NET and J2EE infrastructures and are a natural complement to Web service management systems and ESBs.

12. How does Above All handle security?

First, Above All products respect the security mechanism in place by the software services available for their respective systems.  Second, Above All supports all of the common authentication styles that map to security models employed by today’s Web services.  For example, some Web services utilize username/password while others employ a token.  Third, for a given service or group of services, Above All enables the capture of user credentials appropriate for the authentication style.  The user can cache these locally or choose to re-enter them as needed.   Above All Software also provides a security layer for controlling access to the composite applications and other items within the SOA Repository.

13. How can I integrate my Business Process Management (BPM) solution with Above All?

There are two ways your BPM solution can work in the context of the Above All Composite Application Platform.  First, definitions for Web services that are created and modeled in orchestrations in the BPM tool can be imported into Above All Studio.  The behavior for these Web service contracts can be derived from existing services using the refinement capabilities available in Studio.  Second, the business services that deliver the Web service contracts can be exposed and deployed as fully functional Web services.