Sagitec Enterprise Framework Services
From the very beginning, Microsoft built its .NET Framework to be extensible—meaning it should have the ability to absorb new features without disturbing existing code. Taking Microsoft’s lead, Sagitec’s entire approach to Neospin™ is to build reusable, extensible services that implement agile public pension solutions for our clients. Sagitec extended the .NET framework by implementing two significant components: Neospin™ Framework Engines and Sagitec’s Design Studio.
Neospin™ Framework Engines benefit you because they:
- Allow our project teams to focus on ‘what’ to do rather than ‘how’ to do it.
- Implement coding standards by moving the majority of business logic into XML metadata. XML provides a flexible way to create common, standards-based information formats and share the format and data.
- Reduce lines of code. Bloated code is the root cause of most software problems.
Batch Engine
Operates as a ‘helper’ service. This helper service acts as a separation layer that populates (loads) objects through published interfaces. This service exploits the benefits of asynchronous, multi-threaded processes to ensure that batch processing is executed anytime.
Business Services Engine
Powers the Neospin™ Business Service Tier. This engine is the heart of every Neospin™ LOB solution. Service requests initiated by users (internal or external), integration services, or batch programs funnel through this service tier and engine. Service requestors communicate with the Business Services Engine using WCF on the TCP / IP protocol, HTTP, or Web services communication protocols. In turn, the Business Services Engine calls Data Services, retrieves database information, and sends business or integration objects back to each service requestor.
Presentation Engine
Powers the Presentation Tier and implements several different common services used throughout Neospin™. The Presentation Engine runs inside an IIS Web Server and uses ASP.NET server-side services for session management and Web page caching. Neospin™ achieves load balancing and fault tolerance by distributing the Presentation Engine across multiple physical machines.
Correspondence Engine
Works with Correspondence Services and is responsible for retrieving correspondence XML metadata, instantiating correspondence, invoking business services, creating document tracking data, rendering correspondence to a client device, and processing batch correspondence.
Workflow Engine
Provides workflow services built on top of Windows Workflow Foundation to enable creation of application and service logic for handling asynchronous, parallel tasks and other complex workflow processing. It includes a set of tools for declaring workflows, activities to help define logic and control flow, and runtime for executing the resulting application definition.
Persistence Engine
Handles Neospin™ requests made to any persistence layer. Persistence layers include any object-oriented, relational, network or hierarchical database, or flat or indexed files. This layer provides Neospin™ with a high degree of separation from the database and provides for database independence, portability, and scalability.
Data and Metadata Cache Engines
Stores commonly retrieved data that changes infrequently. This service boosts system performance because it reduces database network traffic. Examples of commonly retrieved data include system codes, code values, system paths, system messages, and others. Any data that shares similar characteristics can be added to the Data Cache Engine. If any underlying data in the Data Cache Engine changes, we use predefined methods to synchronize and refresh the cache.
.NET Foundation Services
.NET Class Libraries, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).
Sagitec extended Visual Studio.NET by creating a powerful, but simple, design tool that unifies the framework engines with XML metadata. Sagitec Design Studio is a powerful XML editor that simplifies the process of binding metadata (business rules, field values, methods) to forms, letters, reports, and files. Sagitec Design Studio provides:
- Extreme developer productivity
- Total platform extensibility
- Solution-focused .NET development
Neospin™ Enterprise Application Management Services
This layer contains another set of ‘black box’ components that are configurable, but do not typically require custom development. The term ‘black box’ is used to describe hardened technical assets that are proven and typically do not require testing unless they are changed.
Report/Analytic Services
Provides services for storing, organizing, displaying and retrieving reports created in the runtime version of Business Objects and SQL Report Services.
SharePoint Services
Represents a prebuilt environment for authoring, searching, retrieving, viewing, and editing SharePoint content from Neospin™.
Imaging Services
Represents a prebuilt environment for searching, retrieving, viewing, and editing ECM content from Neospin™.
Audit Services
Supports the implementation of audit history functionality. Audits can be placed at the column level of any table and audits can be assigned to tables, users, or security roles.
Directory Services
Represents a prebuilt environment for integrating Neospin™ with Active Directory to centrally manage identities and relationships for authentication and authorization.
Security Services
Supports the implementation of application-level security for Neospin™. Administrators will create users, assign them to roles, and define the system resources assigned to each role. Neospin™ supports security down to the file level, including the ability to hide or mask fields based on a security profile.
Administrator Services
Supports systems administration activities such as establishing file and printer paths, setting code titles and user messages, managing templates, setting archival parameters, and others.
Testing Services
Represents a prebuilt design and execution environment to support end-to-end functional testing including unit, systems, integration, life cycle, and regression testing. Includes integrated tools for creating, storing test templates, scenarios, and flows as well as a runtime test execution environment.
Workflow Services
Represents predesigned, configurable processes for authoring and maintaining simple and complex workflows without programming using a combination of Sagitec Design Studio, Visual Studio.NET, and Neospin™.
Batch Services
Provides a scheduler with the ability to assign specific system tasks to run on a predefined schedule and calendar.
File Processing Services
Provides facilities for defining files, associating data elements, calling validation scripts, and archiving inbound and outbound files (e.g., interface files) to and from other external software applications.
Neospin™ Benefit Services
This layer contains a set of business services common to most defined benefit and defined contribution plans. Business services are considered ‘gray box’ because they change with each customer. While many of the patterns and practices are similar between public pension organizations, we discovered that the differences in plan design and implementation are often radically different.
Benefit Plan Administration
Create, validate, and maintain plans; configure plan parameters such as eligibility (vesting, benefits, etc.)
Account Management
Collect and manage information about organizations (reporting and non-reporting agencies) including demographic, contact, plan participation, reporting methods, and others; collect and manage information about people (members and non-members) including demographic, beneficiary, employment periods, leaves, court orders, notes, death data, and more.
Contributions Management
Collect, validate, and maintain employer and member contribution data; responsible for inbound file/data processing; wage and contribution validation, exception processing, cash deposits, and reconciliation; wage adjustments, general ledger maps, member posting, and annual interest posting.
Transactions Management
Collect, validate, and maintain assorted exception-oriented retirement transactions including deductions in error, omitted deductions, invoice generation, journal vouchers (account corrections), and service purchase payment processing.
Calculations
Calculate benefit estimates, estimated and final payments, adjusted payments, service purchases, service credit, average salary, and refundable balance; also responsible for determining benefit eligibility based on plan rules and employment status information.
Claims
Collect, validate, and maintain application claim information for retired, disability, survivor, and other benefits; includes functionality to process marriage dissolutions (DRO), IRS levy, child support enforcement collections, and other claims-based attachments.
Withdrawals
Collect, validate, and maintain claim information for withdrawals; includes functionality to process marriage dissolutions, IRS levy, child support collections, and other attachments; provides facilities for trust-to-trust transfers and rollovers.
Payments
Support retirement, survivor, disability, and refund (lump sum distribution) application tracking, benefit payroll processing, payment adjustments, tax withholding, direct deposit, payee account maintenance, state and federal tax reporting (1099R processing), and eligibility monitoring.
Reporting
Support annual tax reporting, actuarial reporting, member statement, employer statements, and financial statements.
Workload Management
Represents predefined processes and user interfaces (screens) associated with workflow including process initiation, prioritization and assignment, suspension, queue assignment, escalation and backup assignments, process notes, threshold fields, security, event logging, case management, workload management, reports, workflow dashboard, and audit log.
Tailored Extensions
With the underlying layers of the framework facilitating implementation, roughly three quarters of project development time is left for creating and configuring the business rules, screens, correspondence, and reports that will come to define your unique system.
