Extending groupware for OLAP: Where did my time go?

Abstract

While applications built on top of groupware systems are capable of managing mundane tasks such as scheduling and email, they are not optimised for certain kinds of applications, for instance generating aggregated summaries of scheduled activities. Groupware systems are primarily designed with online transaction processing in mind, and are highly focused on maximizing throughput when clients concurrently access and manipulate information on a shared store. In this paper, we give an overview and discuss some of the implementation details of a system that transforms groupware Calendaring & Scheduling (C&S) data into a relational OLAP database optimised for these kinds of analytical applications. We also describe the structure of the XML documents that carry incremental update information between the source groupware system and the relational database, and show how the generic structure of the documents enables us to extend the infrastructure to other groupware systems as well.