 | The Documentation Center is the official site for all product documentation. The Knowledge Base collects most of the technical questions and answers you may have about working with Nuxeo. You can use the "Search" function at the top right of your screen to find specific information throughout our documentation.
An interactive community resource for all types of questions is available at answers.nuxeo.com. |
Technical Questions - Architecture and Platform
| Question | Nuxeo Response |
|---|---|
| What are the core products or modules offered? What are the current versions? | The Nuxeo product offering is based on the Nuxeo Platform, a content management foundation. A set of optional modules extend the functional coverage of the Nuxeo Platform.
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| Describe the Technical Architecture | Nuxeo Platform is the foundation of the Nuxeo content management offering. It has been designed from the ground up as a single, cohesive enterprise content management architecture based on Java. Core content management functionality (such as document management, workflow, BPM, collaboration, content lifecycle management, digital asset management, publishing, metadata/indexing) is all available in the platform. Nuxeo Platform is a highly extensible, modular platform for content application design and development that can be augmented via a plug-in friendly architecture for new feature or integration support. All content management features and functions are expressed as granular services that can be used or enhanced for particular customer deployments based on their unique technical or business requirements. An open source development model, fully documented APIs, and an open standards-compliant architecture make the Nuxeo Platform unique among content management vendors. All features, capabilities and modules are built natively with the Nuxeo Platform set of extension points. This is a key technical differentiation compared to ECM product vendors who have assembled a feature-driven suite via acquisition of stand-alone and inconsistently integrated products. This Java-based architecture, state of the art platform design, and commitment to open source and open standards reveals Nuxeo Platform to be an important step forward in the evolution of ECM technology. Nuxeo Platform has the ability to scale to repositories for terabytes of content, supporting tens of thousands of users and meeting high-availablity requirements of critical content applications. Services can be distributed across multiple servers for optimized system performance. The modular nature of the platform ensures that organizations with content application requirements spanning distributed, decentralized or mobile environments can also scale solutions to be lean and thin, residing in a range of operating systems and hardware devices that legacy ECM applications simply cannot support. |
| Capacity and Sizing | |
| What is the maximum number of users per server? | No inherent limit. Capacity of the underlying database or network operating system would determine any limits. |
| What is the maximum number of pages or documents per server? | No inherent limit. Capacity of the underlying database or network operating system would determine any limits. |
| What is the largest installation on your platform? | There are known customer production sites with 100 Million managed items with no performance degradation compared to a 10 Million item repository. |
| Do you provide documented recommendations for optimal sizing and performance? | Yes. Nuxeo routinely updates our performance and sizing test suites and fully documents the implementation factors that can impact the performance of production systems. All documentation, test suites and performance benchmarks are fully and openly documented on our Documentation Center site. For site specific recommendations, we can provide professional services through our experienced partner network or by our own professional services team upon request. |
| Describe how the architecture enables your product to scale for high volume, high performance environments. | Our architecture separates the content processing/intake services from the data and repository storage services allowing high scalability and performance. We are regularly tuning and benchmarking high throughput scenarios, and publish our benchmarks, load tests and recommendations for performance tuning on our Documentation Center site. |
| How does the product support performance and optimization analysis? | Nuxeo has built a comprehensive test and continuous integration environment in order to ensure performance of the platform and ability to scale are optimized for real-world conditions. Comprehensive test and continuous integration environments with Maven, Hudson, Nexus, JUnit, Selenium and Funkload (a web load testing tool developed by Nuxeo). This environment provides the basis for continuous platform improvement. Nuxeo offers these high quality testing tools to content application developers to facilitate their project delivery process. This environment can adapt to any Nuxeo Platform-based project. Nuxeo has high standards for platform performance, so continuous performance testing is part of the Nuxeo quality assurance process. Results are based on metrics that focus on user experience, such as application response times. The outcome of this continuous measured improvement is that Nuxeo Platform gives rapid response times even under heavy loads, with thousands of concurrent users accessing a repository that stores millions of documents. |
| Describe how your product supports a distributed repository architecture. | The modular structure and the assembly system provided by the Nuxeo Platform architecture ensure all applications built with it can meet demanding availability and scalability needs. Each service used in a Nuxeo Platform-based application could technically be deployed on a JVM (therefore on separate physical servers). It is thus possible to scale up deployments by distributing services and components across several servers and support multiple repositories under one Nuxeo Platform instance. |
| Does your product support replication of content across distributed servers? | Yes. The publication services allow content to be pushed based on business rules to FTP sites, other Nuxeo repositories or applications, including a designated archive repository, web sites or portals. Additionally, we have synchronization services within Nuxeo Platform for repository replication across servers. |
| Is your product able to run in a cloud instance? Explain. | Yes. Nuxeo Cloud is a content management platform that provides a seamless development, customization, testing and production environment in the cloud. The cloud service used by Nuxeo Cloud is Amazon AWS, assuring high uptime, speed and security. Nuxeo Cloud is offered under a monthly service subscription, with tiered packages to fit budget and service needs. Subscriptions can be upgraded or downgraded at any time. There is no lock-in to the cloud edition; organizations that grow or get budget to deploy their own on-premise repository can get their content and metadata exported as part of their subscription agreement to populate their own on-site application. Data stores can be selected based on the geography of the customer to ensure compliance with any data protection or privacy rules. Nuxeo partners are also actively building and launching cloud applications built with Nuxeo Platform designed to deliver vertical industry or specialized horizontal solutions. The Nuxeo Platform has been designed to run optimally either on-premise or on cloud computing environments. Organizations with their own private or public cloud initiatives for content management applications can be supported via Nuxeo's support for virtualization platforms (in fact, Nuxeo makes a no-charge virtual ECM appliance available for either Oracle Virtual Box or VMware compatible systems), or by supporting the customer's preferred cloud platform with offerings such as Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace or others. The Nuxeo architecture is designed to be elastic, scale quickly for large volume (content or users) and uses a license agreement (LGPL) that is appropriate for integration and deployment of mixed open source or proprietary systems. |
| APIs and Integration | |
| Describe how product integration is accomplished and what makes your product unique or advanced in the ECM market. | Nuxeo Platform has been designed from the ground up as a single, cohesive enterprise content management architecture. Core functional areas are all available in this underlying ECM platform, and are not separately built products or systems. Nuxeo Platform is a highly extensible, modular platform for content applications that can be augmented via a plug-in friendly architecture for new feature or integration support. All ECM features/functions are expressed as granular services that can be used, enhanced or even removed from a particular customer deployment based on their unique technical or business requirements. Open source, fully documented APIs, open standards compliant architecture makes the Nuxeo Enterprise Platform unique among content management vendors; particularly those vendors who have often built their 'suite' through a series of acquired technologies, and cannot always integrate them in consistent ways. |
| Describe your APIs | The entire Nuxeo Platform source code repository is open. All content services are described with an extensively documented API model using Java API. An extensive range of extension points, and component services lend the Nuxeo Platform to easy customization and integration with the plug-in friendly architecture meaning that customers or partners rarely need to actually touch the underlying source code to build or deploy their content application. |
| Is your product .net certified? | No, not at this time. |
| Is your product Java EE certified? | Fully respect Java EE but not certified. |
| What Portal products does your product integrate with, and how? | Nuxeo Platform and related applications can integrate with Liferay Portal, Microsoft SharePoint, Amazon S3, Google Search Appliance, Eclipse BIRT, Shibboleth, Hippo, Apache Stanbol for Semantic Entities, Ephesoft, and Scality. Thefull list of integrations and connectors is updated on the Nuxeo website. Nuxeo Platform and related applications can integrate to any CMIS-compliant portal product through native CMIS support. Other portals can be integrated via JSR 168, as Nuxeo has a JSR 168 development kit to extend integrations. |
| What major ERP, CRM applications does your product integrate with, and how? | With an open and fully documented API, Nuxeo customers and integrators can build integrations with a wide range of ERP, HRMS and CRM applications. Current integrations have been done on a project basis with SAP for several customers, but it is not a packaged 'off the shelf' integration at this time. |
| Does your product support virtual machines? | Yes, Nuxeo provides packaged virtual appliances as simple, downloadable packages (complete with app server, operating system, database) for both VMWare and VirtualBox-compliant formats. |
| Does your product integrate with Microsoft Office? Open Office? How? | Yes. The LiveEdit feature allows content creators using MS Office to work from within the familiar MS Office interface and save new or updated documents into the Nuxeo application with a single click. The LiveEdit for MS Office feature requires .NET to be available and is supported in MS IE and Firefox browsers. Similar functionality is also available for Oracle OpenOffice. |
| Does your product integrate with Microsoft Sharepoint? How? | Yes, we have native support for WSS, as well as CMIS support for compliant versions of MS SharePoint. |
| Does your product integrate with GIS data or applications? | Yes, Nuxeo has been used in numerous government and military deployments to manage large, complex, compound GIS documents including satellite imagery, high resolution digital photo renditions, engineering documents. GIS data or any other externally stored data/metadata can be imported to, or referenced by a Nuxeo content application. The relationships feature inherent in the Nuxeo Platform can be used to define any number of references across content. Integrations have been done for customer engagements (such as MapServer), though it is not 'out of the box' and requires professional services. |
| Application Customization and Development |
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| Is the product customizable? | Yes, the Nuxeo Platform can be customized easily with Nuxeo Studio, the hosted design and configuration environment available to Nuxeo Connect subscribers, or by programming new plug-ins or features, with Nuxeo IDE. |
| Describe the flexibility of the application configuration and customization tools | Nuxeo Studio is the configuration and customization environment for the Nuxeo Platform. It is provided as a hosted web-based service for application designers and builders. Nuxeo Studio is available to subscribers of the Nuxeo Connect support and maintenance package. Nuxeo Studio helps organizations decrease project deployment costs, deliver content or case-centric applications faster and with fewer developers needed for configuration. Using Nuxeo Studio also ensures backwards compatibility for new content types, features, lifecycles, etc ensuring that customizations can be automatically upgraded with each new future release of the Nuxeo application. Nuxeo Studio provides graphical, easy-to-use customization tools for:
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| Which scripting languages does the system support or require? | The reference scripting language for the Nuxeo Platform is Groovy, a widely adopted agile development language for the Java platform based entirely on the Java programming APIs. Other Java based scripting languages can be used but without full support. |
| What language is the underlying source code written in? | Java |
| Does the product allow Centralized Administration? |
Yes. Nuxeo Studio provides centralized administration and design options to enhance the experience of the systems administrator. Centralized configuration and design tools allow administrators to create consistent customizations in a hosted environment. Additionally, monitoring systems and administrative options are available via JMX Sensors in the Nuxeo Platform user interface for administrators. |
| Upgrades and Migrations | |
| Describe the upgrade process for installed customers to migrate from one version of the product to a more current one. | Customers who subscribe to the Nuxeo Connect support and maintenance program are entitled to validated upgrade documentation, no-charge downloads of new software releases, QA'd patches and upgrade scripts as necessary. Nuxeo Platform-based products and applications are designed to be backwards-compatible by default. Documentation for each release clearly outlines step by step instructions such as:
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| Describe the average cost and time to upgrade to the next release of the product. | The average software cost is $0, as Nuxeo does not charge for licenses. The average time to upgrade to the next version of the product is typically one week, to accommodate for backup, application of upgraded files, and testing. |
| Standards Support | |
| Describe how your product supports Java EE architectures/standards | The Nuxeo Platform architecture is designed to be highly flexible and extensible based on 3 fundamental principles:
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| Does your product support the JSR 170/283 standard? | Yes. JSR 170 compliance is part of Nuxeo Platform. Nuxeo is also one of the founders of the Apache Chemistry project to ensure JSR 170 compliant architectures are fully respected in the CMIS interoperability standard ratified by OASIS in 2010. |
| Does your product support industry standards such as WebDAV, ODMA, CMIS or others? | Yes. Nuxeo Platform and related products and applications ensure interoperability with other applications through the use of industry standards.
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| Describe how your product supports Web Services or Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) | Nuxeo Platform contains its own native Java API but also supports a set of WebServices APIs.
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| Usability | |
| Describe the usability of the product and customization flexibility | The default UI is a browser-based, clean, simple navigation and search experience designed for typical information workers. An offline client for work while disconnected from the network is also supported, with a very similar UI to avoid unnecessary re-training of users. The User Interface is typically customized by each organization during the design and deployment of a Nuxeo application. Two main approaches are used for UI design:
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| Security | |
| Describe the product security architecture and how the application handles security or access to content | Security and data integrity is an essential part of the Nuxeo Platform. We implement state-of-the-art strategies and features to enable a high level of security and access controls at all levels. The Nuxeo Platform's wide use in secure environments such as military, public sector, regulated utilities, etc confirms the strength of the platform in this area.
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| Does the system support SSL or HTTPS? | Yes |
| Can you require that users log in with a password? | Yes |
| Describe how your product supports authentication | Authentication management is fully customizable in the Nuxeo Platform. With the Nuxeo Platform directory abstraction, groups and users can be collected from existing user data repositories (such as LDAP, Active Directory, SQL or SSO). Authentication can be adapted to a variety of requirements. It is possible to use several directories at the same time, such as LDAP Enterprise for employees and a local directory for outside collaborators. |
| Platforms and Operating Systems | |
| Which server platforms are supported? |
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| Which client platforms are supported? |
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| Which databases are supported? |
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