OpenSpan provides solutions for Contact Centers, ERP & CRM Integration, Risk, Fraud and Compliance, BPM/BAM, etc., 
OpenSpan provides industry specific solutions for Insurance, Banking/Financial Services & Telecom. 
OpenSpan Studio
All OpenSpan solutions are designed and built using the OpenSpan development environment which is available in two flavors: as a plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 or as a standalone IDE. Both versions are available to developers free of charge from the OpenSpan Community Site.
What does it do for me?
OpenSpan Studio provides a unique, intuitive, rapid visual development environment that allows a developer to take control over any application that is available on a user's desktop. Everything about OpenSpan is event-driven and the development environment quickly and easily allows a developer to:
- Identify which applications they want to work with
- Identify which objects within those applications they want to monitor or manage
- Identify which events are important at runtime
- Define what should occur when those events fire
- Expose application behavior as web services
The runtime behavior could effectively be just about anything that the developer specifies, such as:
- Sending an alert that the event has occurred
- Invoking a web service
- Automatically copying data from one application to the next
- Hiding an application from the user
- Adding business logic into a workflow
- Changing the properties of fields within an application
- Populating a toolbar or popup with relevant information
- Displaying a tooltip for process guidance
- And many, many more...
How do I use it?
Working with Components and API's - A developer can add any .NET component to the standard set of components provided by OpenSpan. Thus if API's or standards-based interfaces (such as web services or enterprise messaging) are available for a particular application then OpenSpan allows the developer to easily leverage those. Additionally, a developer can customize the environment by adding their own components. |
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Interrogation: For those applications which do not have an available or appropriate API, OpenSpan provides a capability to expose relevant objects of the application to the developer via a process known as "interrogation". This allows you to easily expose any of the relevant objects used in an application. Simply drag the interrogation icon over the important functionality within the application (fields, buttons, grids, etc…) and OpenSpan loads the object specifics including all of its properties, events, and methods. |
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Object Library: Upon interrogation, each object is assigned a digital "fingerprint" that includes XML meta-data that describes where an object resides and how it can be accessed. This allows the OpenSpan runtime agent (OpenSpan Desktop Automation or OpenSpan Desktop Analytics) to properly access and interface with the object at runtime. It also normalizes all objects, enabling them to be treated as re-usable components that are stored within the OpenSpan library. An object, regardless of the application in which it resides, becomes simply a building block for monitoring or automation now or in the future. |
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Runtime Behavior: Similar in functionality to enterprise business process management visual modeling environments, OpenSpan allows developers to quickly design the required runtime behavior by dragging-and-dropping objects and easily connecting them together. It also includes a highly intuitive design toolset for building out new forms, popups, toolbars, composite applications, etc. |
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What does it work with?
OpenSpan Studio works with virtually any application available in a user's environment, including:
- Windows / Web / Java / Mainframe applications
- Third–party and SaaS / Cloud-based applications
- Citrix & virtualized applications
- Any application or service with standard interfaces such as Web Services, JMS or MQ-Series
- Closed, custom-developed applications with no APIs or integration points
- Enterprise applications, such as SAP, Siebel CRM, salesforce.com, Amdocs, FIS, BMC Remedy, etc.
Which IDE Should I Use?
If you are not an existing Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 developer then download the standalone OpenSpan Studio.
If you are an existing developer using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, then use the OpenSpan Plug-In for Visual Studio. In addition to providing the OpenSpan visual design capability, this version exposes OpenSpan functionality via a .NET API, enabling developers to access all of OpenSpan's runtime capabilities directly from code if desired and mix and match .NET and OpenSpan projects in a single executable.
