Zenteq Doc Team: Publishing EnMasse

"With EnMasse, we are able to maintain a very robust and stable publishing environment, with routine maintenance operations being done easily and remaining almost unnoticed to the users."

Hayk Isakhanyan, System Administrator, Zenteq.AM

Zenteq.AM is a software company affiliated with RenderX and located in Yerevan, Armenia. Among other activities, the Zenteq.AM team prepares documentation for software packages and publishes free books in PDF.

The Network

The local area network comprises a dozen of computers: Linux and Windows workstations, FreeBSD and Linux servers, and test machines with a variety of operating systems. The servers and workstations share a common file system and provide network services to each other.

XEP is installed on the servers; the writers prepare documents locally using editors of their choice, such as Emacs or oXygen. The formatting scripts then delegate the resource-consuming task to the servers to achieve faster response and higher overall performance.

The Formatter

The Zenteq team uses joint power of all of its servers and more powerful workstations to gain maximum performance and evenly distribute the load. XEP Engines are installed with enabled network interfaces on all of the computers; EnMasse access points accept requests over the network or via a shared folder and delegate the formatting to the engines.

EnMasse is used in two modes: for smaller documents, editors call formatting scripts to send texts to EnMasse:Toaster, and return the formatted documents to the authors.

For larger documents and for the final formatting, EnMasse:Actinia gets XSL FO sources from a shared folder, passes them to XEP engines and then stores PDF documents in the printer's folder or in a dedicated location for web publishing or distribution builds.

Hayk Isakhanyan, System Administrator, Zenteq.AM:

"With EnMasse, we are able to maintain a very robust and stable publishing environment, with routine maintenance operations being done easily and remaining almost unnoticed to the users. Upgrade of XEP installations, maintenance shutdowns mean just a slight decrease of performance, and no downtime at all."