Planning your case management system

You must plan your environment and business needs before you install IBM® Case Manager. For example, you must prepare your environment by installing prerequisite software and configuring users and groups. Your business analyst must identify the items and processes that apply to your business cases that you want to automate and manage.

About this task

Thorough planning of your IBM Case Manager requirements and usage parameters can make the installation, configuration, and use of your application more efficient and effective.
  • IBM Case Manager architecture overview
    You can install IBM Case Manager on either a single system that FileNet® P8 is also installed on or in a distributed environment where IBM Case Manager is on a separate system than FileNet P8.
  • Prerequisites
    When you plan for your IBM Case Manager installation, you must consider hardware and software compatibility for the IBM Case Manager server. Because IBM Case Manager works with many other software applications, you must also consider which applications to include in your system, and the compatability requirements for all applications.
  • Planning for IBM Case Manager security
    You manage the security for IBM Case Manager with users and groups that you configure in your Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) repository and apply throughout the system. You must plan for different groups of users and different permission levels for your design environment and your production environment.
  • Planning your development and production environments
    The case management environment consists of a development environment for creating and initially testing solutions, a test environment for fully testing the solutions, and a production environment where users work on active and archived cases. All of the environments include FileNet P8 object stores and databases for storing solution data. In addition, environments include a file system at the IBM Case Manager tier for storing pages, views, and resources, and a file system at the FileNet P8 tier for storing rulesets, if applicable.
  • Planning for IBM Case Manager installation
    IBM Case Manager depends on IBM Case Foundation on the IBM FileNet P8 Platform for content and process management. You can take advantage of an existing installation for your IBM Case Manager environment, or you can install a new IBM FileNet P8 Platform. You also have the option of installing a complete IBM Case Manager environment, including IBM FileNet P8 Platform, on a single server.
  • Planning for non-English installations
    IBM Case Manager is Unicode-enabled to support multiple languages and the installation package contains the necessary Multilingual user interface files. A separate installation step is not required to install the translated version.
  • Planning for IBM Case Manager upgrade
    To upgrade the IBM Case Manager system, you upgrade the software in each environment and upgrade your solutions. Different upgrade tasks might be required depending on whether you upgrade from V5.1.1 or V5.2.0.
  • Planning for IBM Case Manager high availability
    For a highly available installation, plan to install IBM Case Manager into an application server cluster. IBM Case Manager also supports highly available database configurations.
  • Planning for performance
    You can tune your IBM Case Manager system to improve system performance.