Distributed scalable policy based content management

• US 8,799,242 B2
• Filed: 10/08/2004
• Issued: 08/05/2014
• Est. Priority Date: 10/08/2004
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Truecontext
• Original Assignee: TrueContext Mobile Solutions Corporation
• Inventors: Leonard, Glenda Ann, Eisener, Thane, Craddock, Julian, Haskins, Paul, Rochow, Waldo
• Primary Examiner(s): GEBRESENBET, DINKU W
• Application Number:
  US10/961,784
• Publication Number:
  US 20060089938A1
• Time in Patent Office: 3,588 Days
• Field of Search: 709/220, 709/222, 709/203, 707/9
• US Class Current: 707/694
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/22 Indexing; Data structures therefor; Storage structures
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/2365 Ensuring data consistency and integrity
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/00 Arrangements for maintenance, administration or management of data switching networks, e.g. of packet switching networks

Abstract

A method for defining and constraining the behavior of a shared, mobile content management system is disclosed. The method includes providing an admin console for defining, modifying, and managing declarative policies. Declarative policies are defined based on an XML policy model. The XML policy model dictates the policies that can be expressed by the admin console. The defined declarative policies are enacted without requiring the content management system to be restarted, reconfigured, or re-implemented. An XML-based policy wizard definition language is provided to define policy wizards in the admin console that guide an administrator through the steps of creating and editing the policies. Additionally, at least one policy repository based on LDAP is provided. The at least one policy repository has an interface and is adapted to store a plurality of declarative policies. The policy repository has scalable and distributed capabilities.

Claims

1. A shared, mobile content management system comprising:

a computer including a processor and a memory;

a declarative mobile policy model for specifying and editing content policies stored on the memory, the declarative mobile policy model including a declarative language of the form UPON <

trigger>

IF <

condition>

THEN <

action>

;

the IF <

condition>

including events, context or state information relating to an operation of a mobile device;

a policy wizard having a plurality of steps, each of the steps including user prompts and user options to accept selections by a user to create a new policy without coding written by a user, the policy wizard run on the processor for specifying policies, each of which are based on the selections of the user options that includes,

(a) a system <

trigger>

specifying when at least one <

condition>

should be evaluated,

(b) that the at least one <

condition>

must be true in order for the policy to be applied, and

(c) at least one policy that must be performed in response to determining that the at least one policy <

condition>

evaluates to true; and

a content management engine run on the processor adapted to evaluate the policies specified by the policy wizard.

2. The content management system of claim 1 further comprising, a policy repository for storing the policies specified by the policy wizard, the policy repository including an interface for allowing the content management engine to retrieve the stored policies.

3. The content management system of claim 1, wherein the content management engine includes a plurality of filters adapted to select relevant policies to apply.

4. The content management system of claim 3, wherein at least two of the plurality of filters are connected in parallel to each other.

5. The content management system of claim 3, wherein at least two of the plurality of filters are connected in serial with each other.

6. The content management system of claim 4, wherein the content management engine includes a systems transaction processor for evaluating relevant policies selected by the plurality of filters.

7. The content management system of claim 1, wherein an existing policy is modified via a web based user interface by editing the <

trigger>

, at least one <

condition>

, and the at least one <

action>

.

8. A mobile content management system comprising:

a computer including a processor and a memory;

a policy repository in the memory for storing a plurality of mobile policy definition files therein, the policy definition files being written in a mobile policy wizard definition language; and

an admin console controlled by the processor for automatically generating policy wizard user interfaces based on selected ones of the mobile policy definition files, the admin console being adapted to specify the policy wizard user interfaces in XML as a sequence of steps that must be performed in a certain order, the policy wizard user interfaces guiding a user through the sequence of steps via prompts, each step including a user selected option to accept user selections without XML coding input written by the user to create a mobile policy,

wherein the admin console selects the mobile policy definition files based on mapping local and distributed LDAP DNs, system defined triggers, external mobile triggers detected from a mobile device, systems actions, external actions based on mobile device operation, system conditions, and external conditions based on mobile device context and wherein the admin console states natural language expressions for presentation via the generated policy wizard user interfaces.

9. The content management system of claim 8, wherein the policy definition files specify different user options for each of the steps in the sequence and how the sequence of steps should be presented by the admin console in response to generating the policy wizard user interface.

10. The content management system of claim 8, wherein the generated policy wizard user interface is presented to the user via an HTML page.

11. The content management system of claim 8, wherein the generated policy wizard user interface is presented to the user via an application that parses the XML representation of the policy definition file.

12. The content management system of claim 8, wherein the user is guided through the sequence of steps in order to modify an existing policy, the modification being to a specific part of the policy, such as one or more of the following,

(a) the triggers,

(b) the conditions, and

(c) the actions.

13. The content management system of claim 8, wherein the admin console automatically generates a natural language representation of the policy in the form a sentence within the policy wizard user interface.

14. The content management system of claim 13, wherein the admin console is able to highlight a portion of the natural language representation of the policy that is being modified.

15. A non-transitory machine-readable storage medium including instructions executable by a machine, which when executed cause a processor to identify, store and retrieve policies using policy classification tuples having policy classification attributes including <

TRIGGER, OPERATION, SUBJECT, OBJECT>

attributes, the instructions comprising;

identification instructions for retrieving only policy objects from a policy repository that are relevant to a particular mobile content management system request by matching the <

TRIGGER>

policy classification attribute of the policy object to an event that initiated the request and by matching any of the <

OPERATION>

, <

SUBJECT>

or <

OBJECT>

policy classification attributes of the policy object to a current context of a mobile device making the request;

extension instructions supporting a wild card parameter within the policy identification tuples, the wild card parameter matching any value for that element in response to retrieving the tuple; and

static optimization instructions of policy retrieval by ordering the elements of the policy identification tuples.

16. The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 15, wherein the policy classification tuples are translated into a LDAP DN that is used to index one or more policy object.

17. The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 16, wherein a set of policy objects are matched in response to determining that a wild card parameter is within the policy classification tuple.

18. The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 16, wherein the policy objects are retrieved based on their LDAP DNs that are relevant to the particular content management system and the one or more content management system.

19. The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 18 further comprising, an algorithm for dynamic optimization of policy retrieval by building an LDAP search tree that indexes against any of the elements of the tuple with appropriate delimiters.

20. The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 16, wherein the policy objects are represented using an LDAP object schema specific to mobile content management systems, the representation captures a conditional declarative specification of the policy in the form UPON <

trigger>

, IF <

condition>

THEN <

action>

.

21. The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 20, wherein the <

action>

is only performed if the <

condition>

statement logically evaluates to TRUE, when the content management system <

trigger>

exists.

22. The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 20, wherein the <

action>

is a conjunction of system actions to be performed by a system transactions processor, and the <

condition>

is a disjunction of system condition expressions that are evaluated to be true or false when evaluated by one or more policy filters.

23. The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 20, wherein the LDAP policy schema includes,

(a)

a multi-valued condition object attribute such that each value of the object maps to a single condition in a disjunction of policy conditions, and each object attribute value is a well-formed LDAP string or a call to a system implemented method,

(b)

an ordered multi-valued action object attribute such that each value of the object maps to one action in a conjunction of policy actions, and each action is evaluated in order of appearance, and

(c)

a set of miscellaneous object attributes including a common name of the policy, an owner of the policy, a description of the policy, a status of the policy, and an access rights associated with the policy.

24. The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 20, wherein the policy repository is a high performance, secure, fully distributed, LDAP based policy repository, and the high-performance algorithm distributes LDAP policy objects across multiple physical instances of LDAP directories.