A KIX use case: Agile Distributed Integration

KIX seems to be the first tool, which aims to directly support Agile Distributed Integration.


Open source Plone, Microsoft Sharepoint and Google Wave are in that respect all potential contenders to KIX. However, none of them are aiming at directly supporting agile distributed integration.

KIX has one unique feature which makes it stand out - it supports the activities and work flows associated with distributed live documents with dependencies between them.

The KIX support for distributed integration across dependencies covers cases when stakeholders

• are geographically distributed,
• are distributed in time,
• or operate under distributed authority, i.e. belong to different organisations even when there are no formal arrangements.

The crucial question, when trying to achieve critical mass for KIX, is whether this special use case is common enough to support a break through for KIX. In principle the problem of distributed integration should be pervasive. However, in the past it has never been feasible to integrate complex operations without considerable centralisation. Thus there is bound to be a huge cultural resistance against any attempts to achieve integration in a decentralised manner.