Cloud Pak for Business Automation

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  • 1.  Enable Case manager from on prem BAW to an Containerized CPE over OCP

    Posted Fri March 17, 2023 10:29 AM

    Hi  everyone

    We have an special scenario

    1 .- BAW 22.0 is on Prem standard on prem Server installation on AIX,  and ORACLE DB v19

    2.- Filenet CPE 5.5.7 containerized ,  OCP 4.7,  DB2 11.5.5 

    Our customer wants enable CASE MANGER feature, but on this escenario the big question

    Is this posible?

    What are the risk ?

    Where Can  i find some specific documentation or experiences  to implement in this scenario?

    Thanks for your time



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    Mario Cespedes
    CTP
    IBM
    Santiago
    56222003601
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  • 2.  RE: Enable Case manager from on prem BAW to an Containerized CPE over OCP

    Posted Mon March 20, 2023 01:31 AM
    Edited by Ankit Garg Mon March 20, 2023 01:31 AM

    Hi Mario Cespedes,

    Would you like to share your customer's detailed pros and cons (business and IT) evaluation of this request? 

    We had similar requirements where customer was looking for containerized BAW integration with containerized FileNet CPE for case feature. After months of deliberation, it was concluded that such topologies are technically possible but not QA tested by IBM product team hence no specifc documentation avaiable in public domain. Thank you.



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    Ankit Garg Architect
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  • 3.  RE: Enable Case manager from on prem BAW to an Containerized CPE over OCP

    Posted Mon March 20, 2023 07:59 AM

    Hello Mario,

    We have installed for couple of customers, something close to what you are looking, though not exact. But seems what you are trying to achieve is possible. 

    Customer 1 - FileNet P8 and SQL Server database on-premise and ICP4BA (workflow and case capability) on ARO Container. 

    Customer 2 - FileNet on one container and ICP4Ba with case capabilities on second container, both ROSA.

    -Nitin



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    Nitin Upasani
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  • 4.  RE: Enable Case manager from on prem BAW to an Containerized CPE over OCP

    Posted Mon March 20, 2023 12:48 PM

    Hi Mario,

    as pointed out by Ankit, the architecture you are looking for (traditionally deployed BAW using a container based CPE for implementing the Case Management capabilities) is not commonly used and thus - according to my knowledge - has not explicitly been tested and qualified.

    It may work technically, but before implementing it, I would recommend to step back and try to understand the target architecture your client is looking for. Having one piece of the BA capabilities deployed traditionally (BAW) while running another piece in containers (CPE) appears to me like an intermediate step rather than the final target architecture. 

    I assume that both deployments (BAW and CPE) have been used independent from each other, up to know, is that correct?

    When you enable the the Case Mangement capabilties of BAW in a traditional deployment, you can chose the "external CPE, external ICN" architecture where CPE and ICN are managed separately from BAW in a separate WAS deployment (cell). However, in order to to make BAW working seamlessly, you need to ensure that SSO, CORS, etc. is configured correctly between the BAW and the CPE and ICN deployments, which is documented in detail.
    Doing the same thing with CPE (and presumably ICN) deployed on containers on OCP (I assume as part of CP4BA? Or stand as a standalone CNCF deployment?) is not documented as far as I know.


    If you take a look into the future where I'd assume that BAW will also deployed on containers on OCP, the common architecture will be that the BAW pods and the "supporting" CPE/ICN pods (to drive the Case Management capabilities) are deployed into the same K8s namespace using a single Custom Resource Definition. I'm not aware that it is currently possible to deploy BAW into one namespace delivering "process only" capabilities and leveraging the CPE/ICN piece being deployed into a different namespace to provide the "Case" capabilities. 
    In a nutshell, this means that a final target deployment architecture where all capabilities are running in the container form factor, will have the BAW pods and the CPE/ICN pods running in a single namespace. This is at least the case for the CPE that will provide the "Case Management" capabilities for BAW. You may of course use futher CPE deployments just to manage documents (related to BAW cases or unrelated from BAW cases at all) but when the operator deploys BAW it will - at least at the moment - also deploy CPE/ICN/CMIS into the same namespace as BAW.

    For that reason, it is crucial to understand what the target architecture will look like and define the intermediate steps to reach this target state wisely. I'd strongly recommend to discuss this topic internally with our CP4BA deployment teams to ensure that the client picks the best possible route.

    Best regards,
    Michael



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    Michael Kirchner
    Sr. Business Automation Partner Technical Specialist
    IBM Technology
    Germany
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