According to SER Group CEO John Bates, with this approach, regardless of what sources the modules involve, they can be readily connected to work on the same platform. “So actually, if you use them together, they will leverage off each other and they will learn more than if you built two independent solutions,” Bates said. “Then, one plus one equals three. That’s the next generation of content services.”
Composability
Content services are well-suited for the composability precept largely because of their modular foundation, which is fairly uniform. “You need records management, you need a document repository, you need a workflow engine, and you need a presentation layer,” Donze said. However, the crux of coupling these elements with additional modules for AI and tailored application building is connecting them with postmodern cloud techniques. In addition to the standard interfaces Donze mentioned, other means of connecting modules include the following:
♦ Web service calls: Web service calls are an alternative to APIs for exchanging data between sources for composable content services.
♦ Digital agents: Robotic process automation’s intelligent bots are integral to composing workflows with different services. “Bots can pull data from one application by its user interface and ingest that and make it available to a process,” said Kurt Rapelje, director of strategic partnerships at Laserfiche.
♦ Database lookups: This approach buttresses the low-code tenet for composing applications. “Any kind of custom code that needs to be extended by a professional developer beyond the citizen developer’s capability—we offer scripts supporting that,” Rapelje noted.
With these methods, organizations can readily compose workflows and applications from a broadening array of sources for traditional enterprise content management use cases such as document management and onboarding new employees.