Today I was working on FileNet Document Management System, or more precisely on their image archiving tool. Not very new project but in its latests steps. Even the solution is very popular and professional it lacks of flexibility to get integrated with a web application. The solution was to implement a webservice, which I was testing today and worked great as expected.
I would prefer if the webservice layer was implemented directly on the application itself, but for us as long as we provide a working business solution it’s acceptable. Anyway it took months to prepare the SOAP server and get it working in .NET, while I took about 5 minutes to write the SOAP client using nusoap.
Tests were done successfully and the solution was ready for deployment. I heard that the new versions of FileNet include or will include webservice functionalities, but I’m not sure how “proprietary” it will be. But in all cases, if it speak XML we won’t have difficulties to understand each others.
Last but not least, as I always encourage open source for enterprise solutions I feel sorry that Firefox 2 don’t support ActiveX yet. Many web applications are based on activex controls such web twain scanners to make the power of desktop applications available for web applications too. Now I have to downgrade or switch to IE for testing. I can’t blame those who did not switch to Firefox, it’s something really important to be considered in the future. I’ll talk more about this on the Firefox Magazine.
