Implementation Process

Due to the unique nature of each customer's needs and the desire to have a successful implementation of the Web Services Kit, each one will be managed as a project consisting of the following four phases:

At the appropriate time, a project team will be formed at LexisNexis® specifically for your implementation. This team consists of a Project Coordinator plus representatives from several groups within LexisNexis (Business Solutions, Application Support, the Customer Technical Contact, Quality Control, etc.). The main purpose of this team is to see that all required activities for each phase of the process are performed and then to review the results to determine if the project is ready to move to the next phase.

This project team will not interfere with your organization's development effort or dictate how you should integrate your Web Services Kit applications into your current system outside of the restrictions defined in the agreements you make with LexisNexis. The project team's goal is simply to see that your development effort and online research applications comply with those restrictions, that they retrieve quality results, and they do not degrade the performance of the LexisNexis system through the inefficient use of its resources. To that end, your LexisNexis account representative and technical support contact will be available throughout the process to answer your questions as your applications mature.

Pre-project Activities
Normally before a project team is formed, you will work with your LexisNexis Account Representative to clarify your organization's needs and ideas for solutions. Through these idea exchanges, you may explore design options and may even determine that a different LexisNexis Research Service solution would work better for you. However once you understand this API's flexibility and determine that the LexisNexis Web Services Kit is the appropriate solution, you will be asked to sign a trial agreement so you can investigate its capabilities further without making a long-term commitment.

Discovery Phase Activities
After an agreement has been signed, a project team for your implementation is formed. You will then be given an Id and password that lets your developers access the secured areas of this site so they can review this API's capabilities in more detail. They will also be provided with WSDL files, an endpoint URL, and a temporary Id and password that permits limited access to the Web Services Kits certification server.

The primary objective of this phase is for LexisNexis to understand your needs and migration plans. A LexisNexis representative will work with you to clarify this information and document it in a Scope document for this project. When this document is ready, the project team will review it to determine if your intended implementation is feasible. If it is, the project moves to the next phase.
Note:  To reduce the chance of unnecessary complications due to switching WSDL files during development, your team will be given new endpoint URLs as needed along with any necessary IDs and passwords. This allows you to manually adjust the WSDL file to point to the appropriate Web Services Kit API's development, certification, or production server.
At this point you will be required to sign a more comprehensive legal agreement that allows you to use the Web Services Kit operations to build one or more unique user-agent applications.

Validation Phase Activities
After the Scope document is reviewed and accepted, and the necessary agreements are signed, your implementation enters the validation phase. Your development team is given full access to the Customer Development area so you can build your one or more online research user-agent applications. As stated earlier, LexisNexis support personnel will quickly respond to your emails and if necessary contact you by phone to answer your questions. And later in the process, test runs can be set up to check your applications and the impact on the LexisNexis system under load conditions.

Compliance Phase Activities
At the appropriate time you will give the LexisNexis project team access to your Web Services Kit applications or provide screen shorts for the purpose of checking their compliance the branding, legal, and other restrictions described in the agreements you've signed. These applications will also be checked to determine the quality and quantity of the result generated by its searches. And finally a check is made to determine that these applications use LexisNexis system resources efficiently. Since your development team and the Web Services Kit project team have been working together toward a successful implementation, this compliance phase may be little more than a formality.

Rollout Phase Activities
Once the compliance reviews have successfully completed, your team will be provided with the production server endpoint URL and IDs and passwords for your users. Once you get your users set up, you can turn on your user-agent applications and sit back knowing that you have implemented a custom solution that will help move your organization forward in the marketplace.

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About Activity Throttling
The LexisNexis Research Services use built-in safeguards to protect them from performance degradation due to the misuse or malicious use of system resources. The Web Services Kit extends these safeguards and has implemented a throttling mechanism that can suspend service for a period of time when predetermined threshold levels for specific types of activities are reached.

The Web Services Kit throttling mechanism looks for ...

Under normal conditions, your implementation should never be impacted by this throttling mechanism. Most threshold levels are determined for each implementation based on the estimated average work flow plus a generous addition to cover potential peak periods. As activity nears a threshold level, customer support is alerted so that they can investigate. The issue could be a possible flaw in one of your user-agent applications, one or more specific users misusing the system, some external entity attempting to access the LexisNexis system through your system, or something else. If this activity increase is simply due to an increase in normal usage, the threshold levels for the various activities can be adjusted or even suspended, on a per installation or per user basis, for a period of time.

If service needs to be suspended, the timeframe of that suspension could vary. For example if the number of concurrent requests limit is reached, additional requests will be denied until the other requests finish processing and the number falls below the threshold level. However if the total number of requests for service within an hour is reached, service would be suspended for the remainder of that monitoring period.

If you have additional questions about this throttling mechanism, please contact Web Services KIt Technical Support at LexisNexis.

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About the Data Hosting Feature
Some organizations have requested permission to host some LexisNexis documents or document collections on their local server. These may be documents that are accessed frequently or that you want to use the flexibility of XML to integrate them in deferent ways into your local system. They could be particular news or magazine articles, documents and reports related to a specific work project, documents that define specific regulations that must be followed, or documents about the organization itself. With the Web Services Kit, you can make arrangements with LexisNexis to make this come true.

This arrangement does require a separate agreement with LexisNexis in order to protect the rights of our information vendors. For example, LexisNexis is committed to calculating accurate full text document accesses and paying our information vendors the appropriate royalties due them, the issue becomes how to determine document accesses when served from a source outside the LexisNexis system.

To resolve this issue, a mechanism for reporting external full-text document accesses was developed. This mechanism is used in conjunction with an agreement between LexisNexis and the requesting organization as to how this process will be implemented.

This mechanism and the ReportDocumentUse operation used to implement it are described in detail in the Developer's Guide section of this site.

Note: Since most sources are covered by an organization's subscription agreement, these access counts should not impact the invoice it receives. However, some sources may be considered premium or be outside the boundaries of the subscription. In these cases, those counts would be used to calculate additional charges just as though those documents were accessed directly from the LexisNexis Research Services.

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