Open Source ECM and Search
Over the past decade, the amount of content enterprises produce has proliferated as we’ve evolved into an always-online world. No surprise: adoption of enterprise content management systems (ECMs) has seen similar growth, driven by the need to manage and regulate that content. Although content management systems provide an effective means to manage all this content, they don’t necessarily solve the problem of finding the right content at the right time for business users.
Most enterprises have multiple repositories spanning across various departments, each with stove-piped content. Consolidating all enterprise content just isn’t a feasible option, especially in large organizations. For search, the challenge is not within a specific system, but how to effectively search across multiple systems. This is where open source technologies for content management and search come in: they are uniquely suited to both regulate content that’s unique to the business, and to help users find it effectively.
As the name suggests, a core competency of ECM is to provide a predictable way to manage various content types—documents, images, Web content, social content—through advanced services: versioning, workflow, taxonomies, auditing, strong security with role-based permissions and the like. But business processes today are becoming less static and predictable: they involve navigating across multiple process and content silos, often with no foreordained sequence. Doing your job often means searching for the right resources to do your job. While the ECMs may know where every file is, it’s useless if users can’t find the content.
Recent studies have shown that identifying, recreating or moving content around is a real drag on workers’ productivity, consuming up to 50% of their time. A top-down structure doesn’t help a user who needs information across multiple silos. What’s more, individual departments often have their own content management strategies and products, making it even more difficult to effectively search relevant content.
Most people have come to prefer a Google-like search experience from browsing the Web. So the goal for enterprise search is to also achieve a single, unified interface that searches across all enterprise content. Of course, unlike Web search, enterprise search deals with a lot more types of data sources, both structured and unstructured, especially as adoption of Enterprise 2.0 leads enterprise content creation to more varied sources such as wikis, blogs and discussion forums, on top of emails and office documents. But the critical difference is that enterprise search requires much more precision in result-sets to facilitate effective findability. Implemented properly, search-based applications provide a solution that can index data and documents from a variety of sources including file systems, intranets, document repositories, email and databases.
Modern search technologies are in many ways an intuitive complement to ECM; the fact that the two technologies have evolved separately says something about the diversity of problems each was meant to solve. But blending them together is not just about “inserting tab A into slot B;” it’s about adopting the technologies that best adapt to constantly changing content and business needs.
Open source search, in particular Apache Solr/Lucene, introduces essential advantages to the table: it’s more readily accessible (by distribution and by price), and lends itself to adaptation across diverse content resources. A key virtue is its combination of flexibility and transparency: not only can you see just how the code does what it does, you can also see how you might adapt that to your particular content and business needs.
Recent product releases (such as LucidWorks Enterprise) give organizations the option of a commercially supported version of Solr. Search solution development platforms built transparently on Solr and Lucene leverage the cost-effectiveness of open source development and distribution—supplemented with tools and functionality for easier and faster application development and CMS integration.
Open source ECM has proven itself over the years as a compelling alternative to proprietary products, not only due to its cost-savings benefits, but also for its enhanced agility, quality, reliability and performance. Industry-leading open source software includes the Alfresco content management platform and the Liferay portal platform.
The flexibility of open source software amplifies the importance of business-user input into the implementation. This goes beyond what you might save by acquiring software free of expensive licensing costs by making its extensibility a reusable resource. Once you have it in house and develop a competence, it lowers the barrier to reusing the same software again and again on new projects—effectively lowering the barrier to innovation. An open source implementation gives companies the full benefit of the stability and reliability of an enterprise-class system, and also frees up IT dollars for revenue-generating business functions.
Open source ECM and enterprise search customers span Fortune 500 companies across verticals—media and publishing, pharmaceutical, financial services and consumer markets—all of whom are realizing immediate results. For example, an integrated Alfresco ECM and Lucene search solution is enabling a major publishing company to centralize all digital content and rich media across its business units, resulting in streamlined content development, improved search and retrieval and faster Web content production cycles.
But the best benefits are still ahead: with a lower acquisition cost and greater flexibility, commercially supported open source search and content solutions deliver flexible, scalable search well suited to the full span of business needs for years to come, and with it, lower costs of growth.