Evolution of Tax & Duty Manuals Publishing Through Alfresco 4.0

1. Evolution of Tax & Duty Manuals Publishing Through Alfresco 4.0

2. Agenda • Revenue: An Introduction • Tax & Duty Manuals Publishing • Samples of Existing Tax & Duty Manuals Screens • Alfresco 3.2 Platform: Limiting Factors • Tax & Duty Manuals on Alfresco 4.0 • Usage of Functionality New in Alfresco 4.0 • Migration of Data • Outcomes of Upgrading to Alfresco 4.0 • What We Would like to see in Alfresco 4.X!

3. Revenue: An Introduction

4. Revenue Ireland • ICT plays a pivotal role in driving efficiency and quality improvements by: • Reducing labour related processing and contact costs • Increasing the return from our compliance, audit and enforcement activities Working in partnership with other departments/third parties to produce cost-effective solutions By acting as both a catalyst and enabler in achieving business goals Enriching our systems functionally and visually Using our research, experience, agility and flexibility to harness leading-edge technologies to produce innovative business products and deliver high-quality services • Going Forward We Want: • To maintain the Irish Tax and Customs administration as a leader in the public sector internationally • Be recognised for our effective and innovative use of technology Supporting our evolving business processes Benchmarking ourselves against our peers, home and abroad Working within the broader Government and EU Computing Communities • Infusing these features into our proven line of business systems to make them more effective Continuously improving our capabilities Facilitating risk-based approaches within the organisation

5. Tax & Duty Manuals Publishing

6. Tax & Duty Manuals • Background to the System • Freedom of Information requirement to publish any materials where Revenue have issued instructions to staff around assessment and collection of taxes and duties • This requirement covers both inland revenue and customs • Previously this has been handled by a manual process, but subject to the usual risks associated with manual processes • Decision made to automate the process in order to • Bring rigour, auditability and a greater degree of ownership • Allow the existing processes to be reviewed, refactored and refined to ensure efficiency

7. Tax & Duty Manuals • Description of the system implemented • The system automates the end-to-end process of publishing Tax & Duty Manuals to Revenue’s public website (www.revenue.ie) including: • Creation/Editing of Manuals • Managing review/approval/publishing process • Automatic Transformation of MS Word manuals to both Internal and Public (with redacted content) PDFs • Managing associated documentation for both public and internal consumption • Introduced in June 2011 and based on the Alfresco 3.2 Platform (but heavily customised) • We brought in Zaizi as an Alfresco partner to help with the initial implementation work and to help with up-skilling, who presented the system at Alfresco DevCon 2010 in Paris

8. Tax & Duty Manuals • Process • Designed heavily around a workflow process including the following stages: Public PDF Manual Revenue Website Intranet Portal EBrief Operational Instruction Internal PDF

9. Tax & Duty Manuals Governance • Revenue ICT Architecture • System Architecture Web Zone Programme Management Quality Assurance Release Management Live Support Management Zone Liferay Confluence Alfresco Activiti Jasper- soft • ISO 27001 Release Coordination Incident Tracking Ingres MySQL Tomcat Apache WebLogic Operational Reporting Release Planning Talend Mule HA Proxy Eskort LAN Service Management Problem Management Capacity Management Service Desk IT Services

10. Samples of Existing Tax & Duty Manuals Screens

11. Some Screenshots of the Existing System Actions Toolbar Workflow Timeline Modified Document List Previewer Inline

12. Some Screenshots of the Existing System

13. Some Screenshots of the Existing System

14. Alfresco 3.2 Platform:Limiting Factors

15. Alfresco 3.2 Limiting Factors • Difficulty and Cost of doing Share Customisations • E.g. theming, document library extensions • No native Share support for advanced workflow • A custom-built interface was used instead but this had a heavy maintenance cost • End-of-life announcement for Alfresco AVM • Mechanism currently we use to publish content to the website • Issues with orphaned content, Lucene index synchronisation and OpenOffice performance/stability • Issues that were all addressed in post Enterprise 3.2 releases

16. Tax & Duty Manuals on Alfresco 4.0

17. Tax & Duty Manuals on Alfresco 4.0 • The decision was made earlier this year to move the system to Alfresco 4.0 for the following reasons: • Provide the users with some functionality upgrades and process improvements which would have been too expensive to implement on Alfresco 3.2 • Upgrade to obtain fixes for known bugs in 3.2 • Upgrade certain customisations using the new document library extension points to allow easier maintenance and upgrades • Re-platform workflow from JBPM to Activiti which is already in use standalone in Revenue • Move away from the end-of-lifed AVM based transport mechanism and the complexity of managing DM & AVM stores

18. Tax & Duty Manuals on Alfresco 4.0 • Upgraded Functionality • Refine workflow to give a more streamlined process • Update timeline to explicitly show EBrief publishing states • Use forms instead of documents for EBrief and Operational Instructions (OIs) to allow automated publishing of these artefacts as well • Centralise access to the manuals, PDFs, OIs and EBriefs from a single location, rather than holding them in separate folders • Make real-time preview of the public and internal PDFs available to all users rather than just the publishers

19. Tax & Duty Manuals on Alfresco 4.0 • Upgraded System • The system upgraded to use Alfresco 4.0.1 • Activiti will be used as the workflow engine for all workflows • Solr will be used as the search subsystem • Alfresco Transport Service will be used instead of AVM • OpenOffice disabled and replaced with a technology called Aspose: • Pure Java implementation so integrates directly with Alfresco web app • Multi-threaded as needed so avoids OpenOffice performance bottleneck • Higher quality, far more stable transformations • Cleaner, easier to user Java API • Not open source, but low cost

20. Tax & Duty Manuals on Alfresco 4.0 • Demonstration [ Demo ]

21. Use of Functionality New in Alfresco 4.0

22. Usage of Functionality New in Alfresco 4.0 • Activiti Workflow Engine • Activiti designer results in large increase in productivity and accuracy over creating flows manually • Used Spring bean delegates for action listeners in place of JavaScript for greater control and unit testability

23. Usage of Functionality New in Alfresco 4.0 • Metadata Templates and Renderers • These have enabled us to customise the look and feel of the document list without invasive customisations • All manuals use a custom metadata template to show all the information that is relevant to a manual in one place, including: • We implemented custom renderers to: • Show all documents related to a manual in a single line • Include the workflow timeline inline with each document

24. Usage of Functionality New in Alfresco 4.0 • Document List Actions, Handlers and Dependencies • The centralisation of action configuration in Alfresco allows far simpler and modular creation of new actions and we have used this mechanism extensively • over 20 custom actions created, available to different user groups depending on workflow role • We have also extensively used the mechanism to register JavaScript action handlers. • This, in conjunction with the ability to centrally define JavaScript/CSS dependencies for the document library means that a lot can be built as pure extensions with very little customisation

25. Usage of Functionality New in Alfresco 4.0 • Share Advanced Components • The new Share Extension Modules have been used where we had requirements to change the behaviour of existing Share pages. For example: • Adding additional i18n properties for use within the page • Hiding of unwanted components on the Document Details screen • Adding a region to allow an additional preference toggle for users

26. Usage of Functionality New in Alfresco 4.0 • Evaluators • Evaluators have made the mechanism to determine what can be shown, when and to whom, far easier to implement than before. • We have created new evaluators both • As new Spring beans chaining existing out-of-the-box evaluators together • And as brand new custom classes in order to make the implementation of specific functional logic easier to manage

27. Usage of Functionality New in Alfresco 4.0 • Property Decorators • We have used property decorators to allow us to return information about the current workflow • The workflow instance id is decorated to return an object completely describing the state of the current workflow instance including: • Current task state • Assignee, status, due date, etc • Completed task state • All tasks that were completed in this workflow • And their status, assignee, date of completion etc

28. Migration of Data

29. Migration of Data • Moving data from Alfresco 3.2 to Alfresco 4.0.1 • In moving from our existing Alfresco 3.2 live system we avoided the option of upgrading in-place, in favour of an export/import type migration. • This approach was chosen for the following reasons: • The 3.2 environment, because of a 3.2 bug, had a large amount of orphaned content that had not been deleted correctly • The content model and data structure was being changed • Exporting the content to the file system allowed before/after comparisons to be done much more easily • The import could be done to a new out-of-the-box Alfresco 4.0 instance which could be designated as live once the upgrade was done

30. Migration of Data • Moving data from Alfresco 3.2 to Alfresco 4.0.1 • To accomplish the export/import, the bulk import/export tools were used with a number of modifications: • The xml schema was extended to allow the capture of permissions, tags and migration of surf configuration • The export tool was adapted to work with 3.2 • Custom mapping logic was included to make the data match the new model and required structure • The import tool was extended to allow the automated creation of Share sites, including migrating site dashboard settings and site pages

31. Outcomes of Upgrading to Alfresco 4.0

32. Outcomes of Upgrading to Alfresco 4.0 • Main Aims • Increase maintainability & upgradability by using standard extension points in favour of invasive customisation • Deliver an improved look and feel to staff • Allow a more streamlined process • Outcomes • For the most we have met the requirements without invasive changes, but with some exceptions • Positive feedback on the new look and feel with Alfresco 4.0 • Overall a far better experience in development than with any previous Alfresco version

33. What We Would Like to See in Alfresco 4.X!

34. What We Would Like to See in Alfresco 4.X! • Our Wish List • Share extensibility is hugely improved in Alfresco 4.0 but there are still some areas that make customisation painful at times, and below are some areas we think are still in need of some attention: • Extension points on the Document Details screen • Client-side support for extending the permissions model • Form Service – Screen-based creation of forms, cross-field validation • Managing permissions using Share • Document Library – extensibility in some areas (toolbar, selected items, number of actions shown, etc.) • Some clarity is needed on the future of other Share components, e.g. Data Lists, Calendar, Wiki, Blogs etc

35. Questions?