Mashups FAQ - Mashups 101
What is a Mashup?
Mashups can optimize your business and make your business more productive. Instead of relying on manual means, such as email, to coordinate the work of different people and systems, Mashups automate common business processes so that you can be more productive.
What are Business Mashups and how are they different from other types of Mashups?
Business Mashups are composite applications that automate collaboration across people and the applications they work with on a daily basis. By coordinating these business activities, organizations can bring more efficiency and productivity to critical processes.
Mashups come in three general flavors: data Mashups, presentation Mashups and process Mashups. Data and presentation Mashups help aggregate data, but leave it up to a developer to decide where that data is displayed (like a portal or custom web application).
Business Mashups are the same as process Mashups. They are Mashups that include data and presentation, and also include process by providing the capability to coordinate business activities. Once you have automated critical processes with a Mashup, you can then tie into other systems so the coordination extends beyond teams and includes the applications they work with.
How can Business Mashups help me?
Can you think of some small applications that would help drive new business or make your operations more effective? Don’t you wish there was a way you could build and deploy these applications quickly without spending money on costly IT resources? That’s exactly the purpose of Business Mashups. They allow you to create automated processes, tie these processes in with multiple back-end or cloud-based systems while providing the unified experience we’ve all come to expect from web applications.
How do I build a Mashup?
Serena takes the mystery out of building and publishing Mashups with Serena Mashup Composer. With Mashup Composer you can build a visual model of your process and connect it to various back-end and cloud-based systems. Then ‘publish’ your Mashup to a Mashup Server. The Mashup Server runs all the Mashups you build and it can be behind your own firewall, or you can publish to a Mashup Server in the cloud by subscribing to Serena’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering.
What does it mean to ‘publish a Business Mashup to the cloud’?
‘In the cloud’ has come to mean any service or application hosted on a web server that you don’t control, but to which you have access. For example, Google Apps like Google docs (spreadsheet and word processing) are based in the cloud. The term originated from the myriad PowerPoint presentations representing the internet by a graphic or picture of a cloud. When you publish a Business Mashup to the cloud, it means you’ll be using Serena’s hosted service to provide the infrastructure necessary to run your Mashup applications.
How can I get started?
The best way to get started is to try Business Mashups for free. You’ll see how Serena Business Mashups enable you to build apps in hours, not days or weeks. Sign up now and start designing and using your Mashups right away.
How can I find Mashups similar to the ones I want to build?
Every organization can be more productive in some aspect of critical business activities. That means that others have similar problems to solve, ideas to exchange, Mashups to share and advice to give. Serena has built the Serena Mashup Exchange, a virtual marketplace where you can swap ideas, download Mashups to use in their entirety or as starting points, and get expert advice on building Mashups. Everyone who downloads and uses Serena Mashup Composer will have access to the Mashup Exchange.
How much does it cost to build Mashups?
Nothing! You can design any number of Mashups you want using Serena Mashup Composer. You only pay when you publish and start using the Mashup. So sign up for a free trial and get started today.
