ELO is a document management system for which we have a dedicated team. Our support for the largest city of Switzerland is essential. While having internal developers and engineers, the city relies on external contractors to meet its varying demands.

Recently, we celebrated the 100th sprint anniversary with a consistent team led by the same product owner for the past four years. The team’s stability has been a critical factor in our success.

We handle day-to-day tasks, and as of July 1st, Sly has been chosen as one of the official suppliers of the largest Swiss city. This recognition allows Sly to keep working for the city for the next few years and also act as an integrator for other departments. We anticipate receiving requests from other departments where we can apply our five years of expertise to provide comprehensive support.

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Pain Points

A significant challenge is managing 150 ELO systems, divided equally between production, integration, and development. With each system requiring updates, it’s crucial to ensure that new plugin versions are rolled out frequently across all systems -- this approach prevents inconsistencies and multiple issues, maintaining system stability.

Another challenge arises from managing this many systems, each tailored to different departments with unique customizations and integrations by various partners. This situation often leaves our ELO team unaware of some of the ongoing changes and deployments. Project managers from different departments oversee these customizations; nevertheless it makes things difficult to ensure compatibility and prevent disruptions when new features are developed. Although we've managed well with minimal incidents, pinpointing the root cause of errors—whether from our solutions or external suppliers—remains a complex task.

Developing and improving existing ELO plugins is another critical area. The manufacturer provides plugins, so called business solutions for many use-cases. Nevertheless, we have developed, extended and maintained around 35 different plugins throughout this time. The most complex is for records management (Pubsec), which is highly customized. This involves intricate workflows for opening files and dossiers, permissions management, and ensuring metadata accuracy to meet statutory archival requirements. Properly handling permissions and distinguishing between files for long-term archiving versus those that can be discarded are crucial to maintaining an efficient and compliant records management system.

Every Monday, Sly participates in a one-hour Dev Weekly Meeting, providing a platform for the Product Owner (PO) to brainstorm and refine ideas with the developers. These meetings often focus on conceptual tasks, such as improving business solutions and discussing specific features implementation. This collaborative environment fosters innovation and ensures continuous improvement in our development processes.

Sly provides second and third-level support for the ELO system -- two developers and one engineer together with a team of four engineers, three developers, one product owner, and one scrum master. The largest city of Switzerland’s staffing strategy is based on the extended workbench concept. They integrate external resources like our developers and system engineers into various teams. This helps the city to meet its dynamic needs.

As part of the ELO team, Sly assists in opening tickets, following up, providing information, attending daily meetings, and resolving issues collaboratively with ELO. One person of the team is responsible every day for handling operations-related issues, with the authority to seek support from others, but is primarily responsible for dispatching and resolving these issues.

One of Sly's notable projects was the involvement in the development of a Records Management System (RMS). This system, built using a REST API in Java, ensures the compliant creation and handling of documents and files within the ELO system. The API simplifies the process for other developers and applications, allowing them to adhere to records management rules without needing an in-depth knowledge of ELO or records management. This ensures that all data can be stored appropriately and handed over to the city archive.

Sly utilized the CLI (command line interface) system to implement our one-shot scripts, enabling efficient cleanups and smaller migrations across different systems. By writing and running scripts via the CLI, we eliminated the need to package and roll out each script individually, allowing centralized management. This approach significantly streamlined our development processes and accelerated development timelines.

Furthermore, Sly has utilized the existing ELO command line interface (CLI) to create a continuous deployment system; consequently, the system deploys all plugins nightly and manages other configuration systems; thereby, making it easy to configure which plugin versions should be deployed to integration and production environments, ensuring regular rollouts with minimal manual intervention.

Sly migrated existing folder and permission structures into a standardized structure of documents and folders and permission concepts. During this process, Sly played a crucial role in mapping metadata and consulting with customers. The data mapping process was extensive, involving various file types and requiring significant effort, discussion, and consulting. Each migration project necessitates a fresh round of data mapping and consulting.

Code reviews are an integral part of our process. Developers thoroughly review all code packaged, rolled out, or used in scripts to maintain high standards.

The city implements plugins and business solutions that benefit multiple departments or service providers, ensuring broad utility and efficiency across the organization. Smaller developments and developments that are only relevant for one department are done by implementation partners at the discretion of the departments themselves. Sly also assisted other departments in migrating their data to Pubsec, ensuring all records adhered to the correct metadata schemes. This involved consulting of customers, mapping and migrating existing documents and folders to the revised structure and permission concepts to meet their requirements.

In the last five years, there were two major version updates for the ELO base system. Including some architectural improvements each time. While some changes led to script incompatibilities, overall compatibility was maintained with manageable adjustments.

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Timeline

Over the past five years, we have made numerous improvements in the way of working, often initiated by developers in consultation with the Product Owner (PO) or recommended by them. Such as strict code reviews and continuous deployment of all plugins.

Last year, the teams main focus was to implement the ELO 23 major version update. This project involved checking and modifying many plugins to ensure compatibility with the updated version while maintaining existing systems. Ensuring seamless rollouts and analyzing incompatibility issues were critical tasks. The migration of all systems took several months, spanning from the first development system to the final production system, taking more than six months.

During this time, Sly has helped the largest Swiss city to run their 150 ELO systems and 35 business solutions in a stable and reliable manner, as well as to improve the quality and maintainability of the code through code reviews and continuous deployment.

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Conclusion

The collaboration of Sly AG and the largest Swiss city’s ELO Team over the last five years was very successful. It led to higher standards in software development, agility and maintainability of all the ELO systems. The regular refinements and brainstorming further improved the overall quality of the business solutions and integrations. We are looking forward to further accompanying the largest city of Switzerland on their ELO journey.

Feel free to contact Luca Solimine anytime concerning your ELO integration and implementation.