Collaboration Interfacing Tools via Cloud Microservices

Today, collaboration has become a very important topic in companies facing many problems arising from the integration and management of the various products that are part of the ECS. The project born in Intesa Sanpaolo has led to the creation of a platform for the supply of new APIs for the use of collaboration services. By exploiting the potential offered by the Cloud and the microservice architecture, it has made the system of interfacing with the ECS more flexible, manageable and updated. The dissertation is structured in five chapters: the introduction, the problems addressed, the IT infrastructure used in Intesa Sanpaolo, the developed platform and the conclusions. The introduction explains the key role that the ECS has played today in the business landscape and the challenges that are faced technologically and culturally during its introduction into the company. The ECS, born from the concept of Social Business, can be classified in the 4 internal zones of the 8C model for Enterprise Information Management, but there are characteristics that instead differentiate it a lot from Social Media. Finally, ECS is often associated with ERP, but there are at least four aspects in which the two systems differ: the application area, the content structure, the implementation processes and the intended use. "Addressed Issues" chapter reports the main problems faced by the designed platform. Until today, every application, that interfaces with the ECS of the company, does so in a heterogeneous way compared to the rest of the existing applications, very often binding itself to APIs whose evolution is not under the control of Intesa Sanpaolo, but of the vendor of the product. This situation forces developers to rewrite, and often restructure, applications whenever the vendor forces to upgrade the version of an ECS component to a more recent one that implements new features and deprecates others. This makes the application ecosystem of the company rigid and difficult to manage and maintain. Finally, the security: the diversity of APIs and the long transition phases between different version of collaboration products creates security gaps that are often difficult to manage, especially because vendor does not support the old version anymore. The third chapter epxlains the actual ECS infrastructure of Intesa Sanpaolo and its Cloud and Microservices technology. The first topic is useful to understand the complexity, the the numbers and the issues met during this years. The second topic, instead, explains how it was possible to leverage the technology of Private Cloud to exploit the microservices infrastructure introduced in Intesa Sanpaolo via OpenShift platform. Some words on the adoption of OpenShift platform have also been spent. In chapter 4 is presented the main idea of the project: develop a platform that gives the possibility to expose new sets of collaboration APIs that replace all those currently used by the various existing applications, improving the overall management and eliminating the non-managed update component caused by the proprietary API of the various products belonging to Intesa Sanpaolo ECS. A list of first version of functional/non-functional requirements in also reported, followed by 2 main use cases. Last chapter explains some reflections about Cloud and microservices that made the idea realizable and about some issues still open.