Business Summary of the Solution:
The Technical Publications department at FedEx Express is responsible for providing up to date maintenance manuals for each aircraft in the FedEx Express wide-body air cargo fleet. This is a daunting task since FedEx Express utilizes a variety of aircraft models manufactured by Airbus, Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas. To complicate matters further, FedEx purchases aircraft from a number of sources and modifies these aircraft to meet their air cargo needs. Due to these factors, FedEx maintenance documentation needs to be modified extensively from the source generated by the OEM. The source OEM documentation comes in a variety of formats and this makes it difficult to maintain and repurpose for use by other groups.
The project team has been tasked to design and implement the next generation system to author, manage, and publish aircraft maintenance documentation. This system simplifies the reconciliation process between OEM revisions and FedEx originated changes, the authoring and review process, and publishing the resultant content to a variety of output formats. The system will also further automate both the publication of FedEx’s technical documents and access to and use of such documents by others.
Technical Summary:
This project is currently in progress. The application that is currently being developed customizes Webtop using WDK to create, edit and maintain work tracking records and publication change requests. AJAX and Dojo are integrated within the WDK layer to provide a highly interactive and user friendly interface. The application integrates with a LDAP repository and uses Oracle as the database. A custom web service has been implemented to expose the methods necessary to create work tracking records and publication change requests.
XMetaL is customized to provide XML authoring capabilities. The customizations include content merging, graphic editing, creating and tracking revisions, interacting with Documentum using the Documentum Connector, spell checking, and searching.
Tech Stack:
Content Management Technologies
- Documentum 6 Webtop
- WDK
- DFS
- DAM
- XMetaL Documentum Connector
Web Technologies
- Spring Framework
- Google Web Toolkit
- Javascript
- AJAX, Dojo
- XMetaL
- CSS
- JSP
Other Technologies
- LDAP
- Oracle
- Ant
- JUnit
Deployment Platforms
- Solaris
- Linux – Red Hat Enterprise 4