By Russell Stalters and Alex
Holcombe, Compliance Solutions Group (Published September 14, 2006)
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technologies have matured over
the last several years significantly, but for the most part most
ECM solutions still approach managing enterprise content as point
applications. So what’s wrong with that?
Well, with the exponentially growing volumes of electronic content
and the heightened risk of not effectively managing this content,
organizations cannot afford to have content “slip through
the cracks.”
ECM services such as capture, manage, store, and maintain must be
available throughout the organization, both physically and conceptually.
This means every application that creates unstructured content needs
to take advantage of ECM and be accessible at any point in the content’s
lifecycle. Creating a document, reviewing it, making it final (a
record), and destroying it at the end of its life should happen
where the owner created it, when it was created, and as a result
of the owner’s normal business processes. That’s ECM
for the masses.
ECM’s Importance, and What Is Needed to Make It a Reality
Much content lives outside any corporate ECM system because of the
difficulty of using these solutions, or because of a lack of access
to these systems. PC-based storage, and decisions on when to save
or delete content all pose significant risk when this content and/or
intellectual property lives outside a corporate ECM system and is
exposed to regulation. Mitigating these risks and making all information
useful to the organization requires a “leak-proof” ECM
system that is available throughout the organization.
Despite the long-time existing of content-creation tools, effectively
capturing and managing content remains a challenge. What is needed
is a framework that is extensible to all parts of the organization,
independent of underlying technology, and able to provide robust
ECM capabilities as a service so IT developers and software vendors
can tap into the needed functionality through new applications,
browsers, and email clients. Every piece of content would be captured
at the right time, have its lifecycle managed by the ECM system,
and be available to anyone who needs it – yes, a lofty goal,
but a manageable one.
Tipping Points In ECM’s Favor
The broad adoption and migration toward Service Oriented Architectures
(SOA), Web Services, and Extensible Markup Language (XML) technologies
foreshadow a boon for ECM.
While it’s not new, SOA is resurging due to advances in application
development, architectural technologies, and business process management.
SOA, a framework of services that provides application functionality
through well-defined interfaces, is poised to enable ECM services
integration with all parts of the enterprise. Difficulty in discovering
components, non-standard interfaces, accessibility based on the
underlying platform technology, and other limitations have all been
reversed with Web services.
Providing the missing link between reusable components and organizational
accessibility, Web services allow for reuse of functional components
from multiple applications, transforming them from independent silos
of business functionality into a horizontal collaborative platform.
Web services support a SOA model and are broadly usable and available
thanks to the WSDL standard, an XML format for describing network
services as a set of endpoints operating on messages that contain
either document-oriented or procedure-oriented information.
Capturing Content With Web Services
The major stumbling block to content capture has been the multiple
locations and systems that hold content. There also is valuable
information in the system-system and human-system interactions,
which is often difficult to obtain, as is information that relates
to business processes as they happen. All are needed to provide
an accurate snapshot of operations.
While it is easy enough to identify in backend systems the location
of content, inconsistent interfaces and technologies of these systems
mean it access and capture can be difficult. Use of Web services
allows capture and management of information because it abstracts
the underlying technology and standardizes the interfaces for email,
Web content management, collaboration, and records management systems.
Web services also can manage the system-system and human-system
interactions that yield useful information for ECM. As this trend
continues, the result will be the ability to capture and manage
this information as it is being moved throughout the organization.
As SOA starts to grow throughout the organization, the discrete
pieces of functionality these services provide become strung together
to form larger orchestrations that make up business processes. A
new layer on top of this SOA starts to form and becomes the basis
for managing and driving these business processes. Until recently
there was no standardized way to manage the state of a process across
these services. This all changes with the emergence of business
process execution language (BPEL) an XML-based language for the
formal specification of business processes. BPEL extends the Web
Services interaction model and enables it to support business transactions.
This opens the
SOA platform and turns it into the foundation for a new application
layer without regard to the technologies underneath.
What Will This Mean For the Future?
As these technologies and standards continue to mature, content
capture across the organization will become more efficient. The
next missing link between what is available today and what is necessary
for true ECM for the masses is the ability to capture content from
the desktop when end users create it.
We think this is changing.
New content management solutions from Microsoft and Oracle make
extensive use of, and interact directly with Web services. The latest
generation of Office from Microsoft has built-in ability to directly
interact with Web services and can be extended by 3rd party applications
or custom-developed extensions. Microsoft’s next version,
Office 12, will be a Web services ECM system and will include workflow,
document and records management, and Web content management. Oracle
is also fielding a Web services ECM system with the release of Oracle
Collaboration Suite 10g including Records Management. Oracle also
provides the ability to interact directly with Web services and
BPEL via Oracle Forms.
We expect as these technologies and standards mature and SOA-based
solutions are implemented throughout the organization, ECM for the
masses will become reality. The major ECM vendors will continue
their move toward providing a comprehensive set of core Web services
while smaller ECM and other ECM related vendors will migrate their
solutions toward specialized SOA-compatible services to survive
this evolving market.
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