Going External: Content Management for Exchanging Information
An important contributor to the bottom line for corporations in industries ranging from insurance and financial services to manufacturing is maintaining long-term, individualized relationships with top corporate customers. In this competitive marketplace, a large corporate client can equal millions of dollars in annual revenue. Transactions of this magnitude require the coordination of multiple business units across enterprises, but it doesn’t end there. There are serious consequences if information or documents are accessed by the wrong group of people, or a business user is unable to locate critical pricing and procedural information. With multinational corporations growing in complexity, the information required to conduct business is limitless.
In recent years, applications have emerged that are designed to manage content created for the Internet. A wide variety of applications fall under the content management heading. The term itself refers to solutions that provide traditional functionality such as authoring, templates, workflow, publishing and delivery, library services and repository management. Recognizing that not all content is alike, the market is evolving quickly away from “one size fits all” software to individual solutions developed to address specific needs. A new, emerging breed of software supports business to business communications, provides bi-directional publishing and facilitates collaboration. Conducting business between large corporations requires a solution and overall ebusiness strategy uniquely tailored to this complex operating environment.
How can a Corporation Turn Service-Related Content into an Asset?
The answer is in a new approach to enterprise-level content management: the Enterprise Information Exchange (EIX). This is an application that enables communications across the enterprise, provides a central repository for the storage of documents and content, and offers permissions-based security. The EIX is a specialized content management application designed to help large, multinational corporations manage their relationships with business partners and clients. Unlike traditional solutions, the EIX was developed with the bi-directional nature of communications between enterprises in mind. It allows relationship managers from both the internal and client sides to have quick and easy access to a wide range of specialized account information. The extranet is an online “map” of the organization’s relationship with clients. It provides both a global and personalized view of key account information.
In many circumstances, the business user fights an uphill battle trying to maintain consistent representation of the organization. Accessing historic, present, departmental and geography-specific information is no easy task. The EIX has a central repository built to store all documents and content relevant to the corporate/client relationship. The central repository can warehouse tens of thousands of documents, and allows users to retrieve information in a single step through a patent-pending multidimensional search process. Based on pre-determined categories defined by the organization, the business user can search multiple criteria at once, including document type, key words, time and geography. This stands in stark contrast to traditional content management applications which are based on a hierarchical model, and require multiple, drill-down searches.
The EIX provides a corporation’s clients with a single-point of access to relevant documents, ideally suited for service-oriented organizations. By logging on, both the internal business user and the client can retrieve and contribute documents and content. The internal and external users have a single view of the corporation regarding all service-related documents exchanged between the organizations. As a shared platform, clients have the ability to search and retrieve documents with as much ease as the internal user.
Benefits include:
- Single, unified view of all customer-related content for account managers;
- Consistent representation of the corporation’s services for its clients;
- Greater efficiency through improved access and organization of key documents;
- Faster response time to the client’s needs;
- Rapid time to market, with highly packaged functionality ;
About InStranetInStranet, Inc. develops Enterprise Information Exchange (EIX) applications that give large corporations the ability to exchange mission critical information with customers, suppliers and business partners over the Internet in an organized and secure environment. An XML- and Java-based intranet/extranet solution, EIX enables business users to publish, organize, retrieve and share customer-related documentation and business content quickly and easily. Utilizing an innovative Web Content Warehouse system and patent-pending multidimensional technology, EIX streamlines complex communication processes across enterprises while using permissions-based access control to maintain security.InStranet's Enterprise Information Exchange is currently deployed in many high-profile installations, including AXA Corporate Solutions, France Telecom, Manpower, Universal Music, Vivendi, and Zurich U.S. The company's partners include BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems. The company is headquartered in New York with offices in Paris and London and technology distribution partnerships in Europe and Asia. For more information visit instranet