Content Management Core

Unlike a number of other commercial wikis, SamePage has not been "patched up" for the enterprise from an open-source wiki. It has been built ground up on a robust, proven Content Management System(CMS) that is capable of handling thousands of concurrent users and millions of assets.

The adjacent picture is a good representation of the logical dissection of SamePage.

• SamePage is built as a secure, stable J2EE application that can leverage all the inherent scalability features of the underlying application server like connection pooling, transaction management, asynchronous processing, data caching etc . The heart of the system is a CMS core that takes care of content versioning, publishing, link management, file management, user management, indexing etc.
• Web 2.0 features like Wikis, Blogs and Forums are built on top of this solid CMS core. Every Wiki Page or Blog Post is internally treated as a CMS asset which allows us to take advantage of the underlying scalability and robustness of the CMS Engine.
• Encompassing the Web 2.0 features is a layer of functionality and services that makes it Enterprise Ready. This includes powerful WYSIWYG editor that allows business users to contribute , custom UI layer to allow branding, LDAP/SSO integration for the enterprise, Email integration etc.

Scalable Deployment Architecture

All the aspects mentioned above help achieve maximum scalability within a single node of SamePage. However, what really helps SamePage to achieve scalability in large enterprises is its ability to leverage the clustering capability of the underlying J2EE application server.

The adjacent picture helps explain how SamePage achieves scalability via clustering.

SamePage is a J2EE application that runs on a J2EE application server like Tomcat, OAS, IBM WebSphere, JBOSS etc. This application server talks to a database like Oracle or MySQL and a file-system where the published Wiki Pages, attachments etc are stored. Optionally, SamePage may be integrated with an LDAP or SSO server for authentication and access.

In a small set-up, the application server, database and file-system can all be co-located in a single physical server. However, in a large enterprise-wide deployment, the application servers will be configured as a cluster with multiple nodes. Every node of this cluster will be configured to talk to a shared file-system (NAS or SAN) and a common database. As the number of concurrent users keeps increasing over time, additional nodes can be easily added to this cluster providing an elegant way to scale up. These nodes can be physical or virtual servers.

Clustering also provides a fail-over capability. In a cluster of say three nodes, even if one node were to go down for some reason, the load gets distributed between the remaining two nodes thereby ensuring high availability.

Please check the support site for more information on system requirements and multi-node configuration.

Multi-Tenancy

SamePage has been architected as a multi-tenanted solution. What this means is that a single instance of SamePage can have hundreds of secure, independent domains or partitions - each domain, in turn, capable of hosting hundreds of wikis and thousands of users. This is the engine that allows us to cater to thousands of hosted customers in our On-Demand infrastructure.

This same multi-tenancy feature is also available for on-premise deployments allowing large enterprises with multiple departments to achieve more horizontal scalability while streamlining their Wiki infrastructure. For example, a large enterprise, say Acme can have multiple independent domains like http://sales.acme.com, http://engineering.acme.com that are all served by the same instance of SamePage.

Multi-tenancy dramatically increases the flexibility and efficiency of the enterprise wiki infrastructure. The wiki infrastructure management becomes centralized and streamlined while still allowing individual departments/divisions to "run their own wiki instance". This centralized instance can be clustered for scalability and high availability ensuring all domains (or departments) benefit without spending for resources separately. A new domain can be added to the same infrastructure within minutes.

For more information on Multi-tenancy, click here

Logical Structure of SamePage

SamePage has a well-laid out logical structure that facilitates content assets to be systematically managed and security policies to be defined around them.

The adjacent picture explains how the various elements within SamePage are laid out.

• An instance of SamePage can have one or multiple domains (or tenants). In case of the hosted instance, every customer owns a domain.
• Every domain can have any number of Projects and Blogs. For simplicity, the domain concept is completely hidden in a single domain instance.
• A Project has a Wiki by default and can optionally have separate sections for managing News, Forum and Issues. Since the other sections are optional, a Project is sometimes simply referred to as a Wiki.
• The Wiki section of a Project can have a number of Pages, each of which can have a number of Comments. The same holds true for the News, Forum and Issues sections, each of which can have a number of News Items, Threads or Issues respectively, each in turn having a number of Comments. Internally News Items, Threads or Issues are extensions of Wiki Pages with some special attributes/behavior.
• A Blog can have a number of Posts, each of which can have a number of Comments.