* Why ECM systems claim to be efficient managers of data
Note to my readers: I’m on vacation this week and my colleague Bill Heldman was kind enough to let me persuade him to volunteer to write this week’s newsletters. You may know Bill’s work already – in addition to working with me as an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates he also writes Network World’s outsourcing newsletter. If you enjoy what Bill has written here this week, you may want to look at his newsletter as well. A link to that appears at the end of this article. — Mike Karp
Note to my readers: I’m on vacation this week and my colleague Bill Heldman was kind enough to let me persuade him to volunteer to write this week’s newsletters. You may know Bill’s work already – in addition to working with me as an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates he also writes Network World’s outsourcing newsletter. If you enjoy what Bill has written here this week, you may want to look at his newsletter as well. A link to that appears at the end of this article.
— Mike Karp
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems claim to be efficient managers of an enterprise’s data.
The idea of blending an enterprise-class document management system (such as Documentum, Filenet, Hummingbird, Adobe, et al) with high-quality storage arrays, all managed by a staffed, trained records-management group is, if not easy to implement, at least straightforward. You develop your forms-based solutions using document management software and use portal technology to push forms to the intranet, Internet or extranet clients, based on roles and permissions. Security and authentication can be handled in a number of different ways, but a two-way certification authority is probably best for Internet-facing traffic. Error-correction and form content validation is handled by forms-based correction mechanisms. Key form words are trapped in metadata for easy indexing and retrieval.
Once a form has been filled in and checked for completion, it is routed using workflow technology to the various stakeholders who must deal with it. Fields can be locked from stakeholder interaction. For example, property legal descriptions should not be available for editing once an attorney has filed a property deed.
After the form is completed, it is filed into a Content Addressable Storage (CAS) disk array by the document management software using a 128-bit (non-TCP/IP) addressing for safekeeping. Because the documents are stored on disk arrays, conventional storage-area network-based disaster recovery and business continuity methodologies can be used to copy data to other arrays for safekeeping and dropped to tape or ATA disk backups. Records managers determine the length of time a form is to be kept and whether forms are kept at the end of the period or destroyed.
Organizations with a wide variety of customers and a variety of forms-based transactions can very definitely benefit from ECM systems. I’m most familiar with Documentum and Adobe on an EMC Centera array, but there are other solutions as well.
