CentraSite Features

Registry-Repository

CentraSite serves as a catalogue of all the services within an enterprise and it can also house non-SOA assets such as documents, graphics, XML files etc. Additional metadata related to the assets including information related to owner, usage metrics, and relationships with other assets, can also be stored. CentraSite provides powerful, yet easy-to-use search capabilities to help retrieve information related to these assets. It also provides for versioning of changes to assets, resulting in better management and control. The Registry-Repository supports industry standards such as UDDI, WebDAV, JAXR and XQuery that aid interoperability with other systems and services.

Data Model

CentraSite provides pre-built taxonomies for commonly used assets. In addition, companies can create their own taxonomies or modify existing ones to best suit their needs. User extended data models are treated on par with pre-packaged data models of CentraSite. CentraSite utilizes the information related to dependencies between assets to provide both textual and graphical views of the relationships between various assets stored within CentraSite.

Federation

Given the proliferation of IT assets within large enterprises, it is common to find multiple deployments of a Registry-Repository. CentraSite's ability to federate across other instances of CentraSite as well as with other available UDDI-based Registries and Repositories helps companies leverage assets housed within these multiple stores.

Lifecycle Management

CentraSite seamlessly manages the lifecycle of assets from design through production. The various stages of the lifecycle can be easily configured to meet the specific needs of an enterprise – right down to the granularity of the various states within each stage and the transitions between these states.

Governance

CentraSite provides comprehensive asset governance capabilities by providing users with:

• The ability to customize the lifecycle management of assets.
• Granular access control to assets.
• The ability to notify users of changes to assets by triggering events, actions, or invoking external services.

The support for various WS-standards centered around policies and the tight adherence to accessibility standards allows CentraSite to leverage rules and policy execution engines from a variety of partners to augment its inherent governance capabilities.

User Interface

CentraSite comes packaged with an extremely intuitive and easy–to-use interface. In addition, the "pluggable" architecture lets advanced users and business partners create their own modules and add to the pre-packaged functionality and reports within it. CentraSite provides both browser-based as well as Eclipse plug-in based access and provides different views of the information, to cater to the needs of different users.

Security

Access and operational security related to assets is built in to CentraSite. The simple, yet powerful interface within CentraSite lets companies associate the appropriate level of security to groups, users, asset types and individual asset instances. CentraSite also provides role-based access to service metadata for better visibility and security.

Standards

One of CentraSite's key differentiators is its adherence to standards that aid interoperability and reuse of assets such as UDDI, WebDAV, JAXR, WS-Policy, XPDL, SVG, and XQuery. This has been one of the major reasons for its adoption by a growing list of CentraSite Community partners.