What Enterprises Need: Easy Integration with Existing Systems

This is the fourth installment in our weekly technical blog series about Enterprise Content Transformation: What Enterprises Need. The series kicked off with an overview of the reasons your organization needs an ECT platform, and has covered the importance of linear scalability and high availability when investing in business applications.

Organizations can improve efficiency and optimize business processes by integrating Enterprise Content Transformation with existing business systems.  AIIM’s State of the ECM Industry 2011 states that “72% of larger organizations have three or more ECM/Document Management/Records Management systems and 25% have five or more.” This supports the need for independent software vendors (ISVs) like Adlib to make it simple to integrate their platform into existing IT infrastructure.

The Adlib Platform provides a variety of flexible options to make integration with business systems as simple as possible.  The easiest way to integrate is to use Adlib’s out-of-box connectors.  In this case, the integration is as simple as installing the connector (e.g. SharePoint Workflow Connector) and incorporating triggers to initiate content transformation within the business process. In most cases, the business system user interface allows users to make ad hoc content transformation requests. For SharePoint, Adlib provides a number of workflows that can be initiated from document libraries.  In addition, some connectors also provide events that can be used by customers to introduce other processes (e.g. gather metadata) in order to meet specific business needs.

In the cases where Adlib does not have an out of the box connector for your business system, Adlib provides a Connector Framework that simplifies the integration development with the assistance of our Professional Services team. The Connector Framework is Java–based, and therefore can operate on any platform. The Connector Framework is designed such that its connectors can provide high availability and can be easily configured and monitored by the Adlib Platform. You can leverage the platform capabilities such as the Process Manager, which monitors and automatically restarts components that have stopped unexpectedly, and alerting to send notification of failed connectors.  

You also have the option to implement your integration using web services. Adlib has abstracted the system configuration from the integration.  Simply put, the developer does not need to understand the business process to build the integration, and the Business Administrator (who is responsible for configuring the Adlib system to meet the business needs) does not need to be familiar with the integration.