When representatives from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) approached Metaversant about helping them establish Alfresco as an ECM repository for the entire lab to use to manage mission-critical content, we jumped at the chance to play a part in America’s space program.
Metaversant started by establishing operational procedures to ensure a stable, reproducible environment that covers the entire Alfresco change lifecycle, from inception, through development, and ultimately production deployment. In addition to process standardization, this also involved the creation of not only the production cluster but also several “lower” environments where customizations and add-ons can be developed and tested prior to rollout.
To help keep changes to production flowing smoothly, Metaversant leveraged Ansible to automate Alfresco installation, configuration management, deployments, and upgrades for Alfresco Content Services, Alfresco Process Services, and custom-developed content-centric applications.
JPL went live with Alfresco running on a data center hosted by an infrastructure as-a-service provider. Later, a decision was made to move the infrastructure to an in-house data center. Metaversant planned and executed that migration, working in close partnership with JPL’s Alfresco and infrastructure teams.
In addition to developing a number of customizations to the Alfresco user interface, Metaversant was responsible for designing and developing an integration server that sits alongside Alfresco. The integration server ingests Alfresco audit data and converts that data to events that microservices can subscribe and react to. Examples of microservices that Metaversant developed for JPL include:
- A service that sends Alfresco metadata to Elasticsearch and Splunk
- A reporting application that lets non-technical end-users visualize and explore data stored in the Alfresco repository
- A semantic tagging application that sends Alfresco content to a semantic platform which categorizes the content according to multiple taxonomies
Beyond working on ACS and custom application development, Metaversant was instrumental in implementing a suite of complex custom processes using Alfresco Process Services. The JPL business users and internal developers created the initial processes and back-end API’s while Metaversant worked on the APS Java code needed to wire it all together.
Got a project that’s ready for lift-off? Contact us so we can help you manage your mission-critical content.