Enterprise Activity Streams

In 2011, system-crossing activity streams will be reality in public web 2.0 services like Facebook. Following the innovation cycle of web 2.0 products, business customers will expect the same functionality in their applications soon.

To meet this vision, ENACT aims to provide business users with a stream-based view of “what is happening” in their workspace. This includes the possibility of actively publishing information into their stream (see our microblogging project). ENACT enables users to “follow” activities related to their colleagues, projects, customers and topics as an aggregation of activities performed in various systems (these systems are called “activity provider”).

Our project’s final goal is to create a running prototype and to validate a) the business use of ENACT and b) appropriate ways of implementation. Therefore our defined project steps include

1. Identify and describe business use cases for ENACT.
2. Design the architecture of an ENACT system (layer model) and define a common vocabulary of important concepts (e.g. activity provider).
3. Define a standard protocol for publishing/accessing activities in activity providers (special problems: distributed rights/access management, distributed context management, push/pull and scalability).
4. Enable activity providers to publish activities using the protocol (e.g. SAP ERP).
5. Built a middleware to collect, store and provide activity information.
6. Built a front-end for consuming activity streams.
7. Validate ENACT in real life scenarios.