Enabler's integrated repository services include support for object, version, configuration and process management as well as providing vendors with a choice of integration and user access modes which support the building of departmental solutions that scale to the enterprise.

Enabler provides flexible and comprehensive data storage, the ability to create complex object relationships, high-performance scalability and the ability to react rapidly to changing market requirements.

Enabler's object-based approach to modeling allows direct models of the real world to be created. These models describe objects, whose properties and state are represented by attributes. Connections existing between objects are modeled as relationships, which can also have attributes describing them. Modeling in Enabler supports the effective reuse of information by allowing tools to establish and use common structures.

Enabler allows sets of object versions to be assigned to a configuration object in order to create configurations. Once created a configuration can be accessed, updated and managed as a single entity. Additional support is provided for the management of builds and releases through Enabler's ability to version configurations.

Enabler's Process Management Service allows the lifecycle of individual classes of object to be defined and provides the means by which these lifecycles, once assigned to individual object versions, can be animated. These capabilities are essential in establishing support for configuration, change and quality management and in automating those tasks which users often consider to be a time-consuming chore.

Enabler's Internet Access Service allows users to view the contents of a repository over a corporate intranet or even via the internet. Only the user's chosen internet browser needs to be installed in order to make use of this service. Access to the repository is dynamic ensuring that the user sees the current state of information in the repository and not a snapshot taken at some point in the past.

The Enabler Software Development Kit (SDK) provides the Softlab Foundation Classes, ODBC driver, OLE automation server, C-API and a sophisticated object browser, and fully supports the Client/Server model for Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows NT clients.

Whether the requirement is for enterprise-wide, mission-critical client/server, or line-of-business decision support, or interactive WEB-based publishing applications, managers and developers are faced with the following common challenges:

• Information sharing and team coordination
• Management of the development process
• Control of versions, configurations and release management
• Successful system deployment and future enhancement.

The complex, heterogeneous, nature of both development and production environments requires the level of sophisticated management and control traditionally associated with large mainframe-oriented development practices. For the modern environment, however, these management controls must be:

• Pervasive but flexible
• Easy to configure and manage
• Available through moderninterfaces
• As far as possible, transparent to the end user

This new environment requires new sets of tools, enabled in new ways in order to meet the needs of organizations and to support the whole of the business systems continuum from software professional to business professional.

At the heart of the Enabler repository is an object-based datastore capable of supporting online access by hundreds of users.

In Enabler datastores, direct models of the real world can be created. The models describe objects, whose properties and state are represented by attributes. Connections existing between objects are modeled as relationships, which can also have attributes describing them.

The major benefit of this kind of model is that it can group the modeled objects and relationships in all their diversity in abstract object classes and relations.

Modeling in Enabler supports effective reuse of information with a common structure, and enables its semantic integration. Applications and tools can establish and use common structures. In comparison with the relational model the architecture of the Enabler datastore is optimized for different types of access:

A relational DBMS architecture optimizes updates to stable item structures, and
independence from application-level semantics. The Enabler datastore architecture optimizes navigation in dynamic relationship structures, and the exploitation of application-level semantics.

The Enabler repository provides the infrastructure for integrating tools. Program
generators, word processing systems and other tools can all access the data held in the datastores.

Object management provides the basic functions for storing and managing data in the form of objects, attributes and relationships.

Version management records a history of the life cycle of a given object in a multi-user environment. Users can establish alternative development paths (variants) and merge these variants to form a consolidated version.

Configuration management enables object versions to be grouped. A set of versions grouped in this way can all be developed and administered together. Process management enables the lifecycle of an object to be defined and managed so that at any time its state is known.

Workspace management and context management define views of a datastore. This ensures that teams or individual users always have exactly the information at their disposal which they need for their work. Unnecessary information is masked from their view of the datastore.

The Enabler repository has a client/server architecture.

A client application submits its calls for operations to the Enabler datastore via a LAN (Local Area Network). The operations are executed on the datastore and the response is then returned to the application via the LAN.