Collaboration Store

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”
— Howard Aiken

So I have had this idea percolating in the back of my brain for a while, but other than a few false starts, I haven’t ever done much with it. I have considered a number of different approaches, and have gone back and forth on the best way to tackle one thing or another, but other than mulling things over inside of my head, I have never really attempted to build anything out. I still don’t have a full understanding of how I am going to accomplish certain things, but that’s never really stopped me before from just plowing ahead with what I know and figuring the rest out along the way. Like most things, the most important thing of all is to just get started, and the rest will all work itself out over time. As they used to say in the old Nike commercial: Just Do It!

It’s a pretty simple idea, really. I want to build something like the ServiceNow Store or the developer’s Share site, only for a limited consortium of instances. It might be a collection of PDIs or an industry group or maybe just a couple of independent instances in the same organization, but the idea is to have a way to share stuff amongst a private group that are not otherwise connected in the way that one customer’s multiple instances are connected via their own internal store. I’ve gone back and forth on whether it would be better to do this peer to peer, with no central host, or to designate one of the instances as the master and have all of the others communicating through that one and not directly with each other. There are issues and benefits with each approach, and I really like the idea of having no single instance in charge, but after mulling over all of the various challenges, I think having a host instance would be the easiest approach, so I am going to make my first attempt using that strategy.

At this point, I don’t have all of the details worked out, but I have a rough idea of what I would like to accomplish. The first order of business would seem to be to get the instances talking to one another, which I plan to do using the built-in REST capabilities of the Now Platform. Some of the transactions will have to be built using the Scripted REST API, but hopefully most of them will just use the standard, out-of-the-box capability. My plan is to create a Scoped Application with a set-up process where you will either elect to set up a Host Instance, or provide the instance name of the Host Instance to which you would like to connect. The I am the Host option would be the simplest to code; the other would require communication with the specified host and getting your instance registered with the Host Instance. Also, any time a new instance was registered with the group, all of the other instances should be notified of the new member of group. Things now start to get a little complicated here, and this is just the initial set-up! As I said, I don’t have all of the details worked out just yet, but I do have the basic idea, so I just need to get started and see how things start to come out.

To keep track of the instances in the collective, I will need to set up a table that will contain all of the details for each instance. It shouldn’t be too much data; maybe just the instance name, a display name, a description, and some control data like an active flag or an activation date of some kind. Also, if I want keep track of activities related to each member instance, I might also want an activity log table as well. I like the idea of having that information, but I may save that feature for a later time once I get all of this other stuff worked out the way that it needs to be.

There are a bunch of other considerations such as Roles, ACLs, and web-only service accounts to make all of this work, but again, that’s all in the details. Things should definitely be secured, and I will definitely want to do that, but my usual experience with Security is trying to get around it. It will be interesting to spend a little time on the other side of the fence. But that is not my first priority. Initially, I just want to get something to work. Once we cross that bridge, then I will circle back and make sure that everything is locked down in the way that it should be. I can only deal with one thing at a time, so to kick this thing off, I am just going to try to build out the initial set-up process. That’s complex enough all by itself. And it will probably take a little time, just to get that tuned up the way that I want it to work.

So, that’s the idea, anyway, and today was just about throwing the idea out there for all to see. Next time out, I will start putting the pieces together to see if we can’t turn the idea into a real, functioning scoped application.