Content Management for the Rest of Us The Next Wave
In the past few years, major changes have been taking place in the content management marketplace. Organizations that previously considered content management a niche application focused on workgroup or departmental deployments for meeting specialized publishing-oriented requirements are increasingly requesting true enterprise deployments that deliver content management capabilities to all their users. These changes have created a need for a scaleable, affordable and highly usable solution that bridges the huge gap between limited-capability file servers and specialized, expensive and complex content management and records management applications. Oracle refers to such a solution as content management for the rest of us. This article discusses the drivers of market evolution and identifies key solution requirements for the changing market.
Evolution of the Content Management Market
The products that most people think of when they hear the term "content management" began to emerge about 15 years ago to support the creation, management and publication of unstructured data (or content) for users who specialized in content production in highly regulated industries. However, the vast majority of content is actually used by those of us who are not content specialists (about 95% of all business users) and that content mostly resides on desktops and file servers—without any real management at all. In the past few years, three conditions began driving major changes in the market and have given rise to a need for solutions that bridge the huge gap between limited-capability file servers and specialized, expensive and complex content management applications. First, the rapid and accelerating explosion of all types of content—documents, e-mails, instant messages, images, etc.—has driven a need for putting better content tools in front of all enterprise users to help them make sense of the flood of data...or at least keep them from drowning in it.
Second, a series of corporate scandals focusing on the discovery, alteration or inappropriate destruction of documents and e-mails has dramatically increased awareness about the risks resulting from the proliferation of poorly managed content.
Finally, a plethora of government and industry regulations emerged—largely in response to these scandals—that dramatically increased the costs of compliance as well as the risks of non-compliance.
The net impact has been to transform content management from a niche market, catering to content specialists at the very top of the "user pyramid," to a mainstream technology that serves virtually every user in an enterprise. The term "enterprise content management" (ECM) was, until now, a misnomer since it originally meant a solution specifically for content-production specialists that managed the different types of content in the enterprise—not one that met the needs of a broad range of users. The capabilities required of a true enterprise-wide content management solution can be summarized into four categories as follows:
1. File and Document Management
To serve all knowledge workers in an enterprise, the solution must provide significant file and document management capabilities with rich user interfaces, flexible access control and user management and policy-based management behaviors. The solution should deliver a rich and highly interactive experience for both Web and Windows desktop users. The user interface should appear instantly familiar, with a dynamic tree view, right-click and pull-down menus and other familiar desktop tools. Ideally, the solution should be integrated with popular navigation tools such as Windows Explorer, and provide seamless offline content management capabilities so that users can easily access and manage content when disconnected from the network.
A flexible security model is essential, with the ability to specify fine-grained permissions and access at the folder and document level. To support the needs of a broad range of participants and processes in multiple lines of business, the solution also needs customizable, role-based access control that can be applied to individuals and groups of users. Behaviors controlling management of the information lifecycle, such as versioning, attribution and records management, need to be specified through policies that can be established on a folder-by-folder basis. It should be possible for versioning to be disabled, applied to content manually by users or automatically applied based on the occurrence of a specific event such as check-in. Category attributes must similarly be manually or automatically applicable, with default values (set as user-editable or not) assignable to individual categories. Records management (detailed below) is also managed through policies on a folder-by-folder basis. While policies will normally be managed by a small subset of users with specific administrative permissions, the tools for setting up policies should be straightforward and consistent, allowing delegation of policy management appropriate to the needs of the business.
By utilizing automated policies instead of requiring users to remember to perform extra steps, these important lifecycle management capabilities become truly useful and the risk of user rejection often associated with content management deployments is minimized.
2. Web Services
To support cost-effective integration of content management capabilities within enterprise applications, the solution should be based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to provide programmatic access to application functionality via J2EE- and Microsoft.NET-compatible Web Services APIs. This facilitates automation of business processes (see below) and extension of application logic so that users can take advantage of content management functionality directly from their application environment rather than switching context to specific content management applications.
3. Business Process Automation
To provide maximum benefit in terms of improved productivity and business agility, an enterprise content management solution needs to provide business process management (BPM) capabilities to automate business processes through the use of workflows. Both standard workflow templates and customizable workflows are needed, so that organizations can continue to optimize processes to adapt to changing business requirements. Content management solutions should provide the ability to use workflows to drive review and approval cycles, notify users that a new document version has been checked in, or prevent the deletion of a document without a manager's permission. In addition, workflows can invoke Web services to perform management actions, thus enabling the automation of business processes.
4. Records Management
With regulatory compliance issues becoming increasingly important, records management (RM) capabilities are essential in a successful enterprise content management solution. Records management provides the ability to specify that a document or other content entity is to be retained for a certain period of time, prevents or controls changes to the document during the retention period and disposes of the document in a prescribed way once the retention period has expired.
Records management capabilities required as part of a content management solution include file plan-based record organization, record search and flexible classification and retention policy management. It must be possible for records to be declared manually by users or automatically through policy-based record declaration.
Today's technologies enable RM systems to be based on a SOA that leverages business process management standards like BPEL, incorporating RM into the infrastructure as a Web service consumable by any user or application in the context of the business process. This addresses three major challenges for next-generation records management deployment:
- Capturing business-critical records enterprise-wide becomes possible when RM is incorporated as services in multiple environments and the records stored in a highly scalable and available repository;
- RM becomes accessible to knowledge workers in the context of their normal work without having to access specialized RM applications; and
- Records can be captured programmatically from business applications, portals, and ad-hoc data sources through RM Web services.
The market for content management and records management is evolving from specialized vertical applications to true enterprise deployments. These changes will expand the market substantially and require solutions that can bridge the huge gap between ubiquitous file servers and traditional high-end ECM products. Such solutions must provide horizontal functionality across the entire enterprise and complement existing departmental content management focused on specific vertical applications.
The requirement for enterprise-wide records management means organizations should view records management not as a monolithic stovepipe application, but as an extension of their information infrastructure built on a SOA. This new way of thinking about records management opens the way to actually provide records management for everyone and every process in an enterprise.
To meet the requirements for true enterprise deployments, a solution must deliver content management for all enterprise users, everywhere they want it, and for every business process that requires it. It must provide users precisely the functionality needed without changing the way they work, and it must scale to support the largest enterprise—at costs that finally make enterprise deployment affordable.
Mass Adoption at Oracle
While this market evolution and expansion was unfolding, Oracle was steadily becoming more interested in the opportunity. It was also steadily improving its ability to eliminate the arbitrary distinction between structured (transactional) data, and content. Unlike other content management products that use a complex conglomeration of database-managed metadata and a flat file-system for actual content storage, Oracle used the database to store all content-related information—metadata, relationships, indices, system state—and the content itself. As a result, the reliability, security and scalability of the Oracle database, together with its tools for business continuity, access control, search and query, auditing and tracking, etc. could be applied to content as well as transactional data. A new paradigm emerged where all information could be managed using the same tools and made available to all applications whenever and however needed.
Oracle's Internet File System (iFS), its successor the Content Management Software Developers Kit (CM SDK), and the Oracle Files component of Oracle Collaboration Suite were milestones during the paradigm shift.
By mid-2003, Oracle Files had become a robust and highly scalable solution for consolidated file management and sharing and lightweight document management. Oracle's own internal adoption of Files is a powerful example of the product's capabilities. One Files application running on a single Oracle Database instance meets virtually all the file management and sharing needs of Oracle's 55,000+ employees worldwide, managing over 22 million documents and 7 Tbytes of storage and growing at a rate of more than 30,000 new documents a day.
What the Market Needs
Experience with its successful internal implementation, coupled with reviews of the requirements of over 200 customers, gave Oracle an excellent perspective of what the market needs for a content management solution with true enterprise-wide adoption. This perspective has been valuable in building Oracle Content Services 10g, the next generation of Oracle Files. A fundamental requirement for any content management solution to be successful is to provide a high level of functionality, usability and expandability. In order to be adopted by business users and knowledge workers throughout an enterprise, a content management solution must provide precisely the tools and facilities customers require, seamlessly surfaced in familiar environments when and where users need it and without negatively impacting the way they work. Such a solution must:
- Increase productivity by making information throughout the enterprise easier to find, manage and share;
- Reduce risk through better control of information and establishment of consistent information policies and processes;
- Facilitate compliance with government and industry regulations through records management; and
- Lower costs through consolidation of server hardware, software licenses and administrative support.
Rich Buchheim has more than 38 years of leadership experience in content management and related areas. His current role at Oracle focuses on leading product management and setting the overall strategic direction in the areas of enterprise content, records, and compliance management. Prior to Oracle he was president of LaunchWay Consulting, a consulting firm focusing on content management and enterprise computing strategies. He has previously served as president and chief executive officer of iHarvest Corporation, a provider of Web content capture and annotation technology (acquired by Interwoven) and Integrated Computing Engines, Inc. (ICE), which developed rich media production and management products.
For nearly three decades, Oracle, the world's largest enterprise software company, has provided the software and services that let organizations get the most up-to-date and accurate information from their business systems. Oracle Collaboration Suite brings together the essential components of collaborative productivity: Web conferencing, content management, e-mail, voice mail and an integrated calendar. For more information, please visit Oracle