“As customers move beyond single Web service deployments into meaningful SOAs, one of their primary challenges is to break down organizational silos and communicate effectively across disparate teams – XML is a good language for developing services, but not for communicating with people,” said Frank Grossman, president and founder of Mindreef. “We designed Mindreef Coral to help everyone in the service oriented lifecycle communicate effectively, share important information, and contribute to the Web services development experience, while growing their SOAs efficiently and pragmatically.”

Mindreef Coral includes a powerful set of extensible tools for IT professionals who operate at the XML software layers:
Foundational Governance – Enables all team members to participate in the governance process. Multi-role tool support allows corporate architects to codify organizational policy and author custom rules. Project architects, developers and testers can easily check for compliance as services are built and tested. Support and operations staff can easily check for compliance causes when problems arise.
Multi-role Testing – Enables all team members to perform tests that are most meaningful to their roles. This includes functional and regression testing, as well as quality, interoperability and conformance to organizational and industry standards.
Collaborative Diagnostics – Enables service team and community users to collect and share all the elements of a Web service for problem analysis. Coral includes a first-to-market Web services simulation tool for prototyping Web services; prototypes can be run stand-alone or before the Web service is built.
Lifecycle Support – Mindreef Coral’s community view helps prevent support issues by exposing service contracts in a form that makes them easy to understand and investigate. When problems are reported, Mindreef Coral eliminates misunderstandings and finger pointing by making it easy to assemble and communicate a complete and platform-independent, reproducible scenario that includes all relevant XML artifacts, a script and simulation data if necessary.

Mindreef Coral’s tools operate on Mindreef shared workspaces (MSW). MSWs let users encapsulate and share Web service data with hi-fidelity and completeness. Besides Web services artifacts like WSDL files and SOAP messages, an MSW can contain a playable script, simulation data and descriptive notes. MSWs can be shared across teams, or with the Web services community at large using Mindreef Coral’s community portal.

Mindreef Coral is available for purchase on a concurrent-user license basis. Pricing starts at U.S. $999 for a Coral Server that includes the base system components and two-user licenses. Additional user licenses can be added as needed for U.S. $499 per year. The platform runs on Windows XP Professional or Windows Server 2003.