What Enterprises Need: Technical Series on Content Transformation

This is the first installment in a weekly technical blog series over the next month or so about what enterprises need from their content transformation platform. This series should prove particularly interesting to enterprise IT management and staff who support ECM systems, Microsoft® SharePoint® and other corporate document repositories.

There are two main reasons why you need an Enterprise Content Transformation platform:

1. Many enterprises have multiple ECM platforms such as SharePoint, Documentum and FileNet. In fact, 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.” (!) In addition, enterprises also have other types of systems, including Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems such as Dassault’ s ENOVIA, and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems such as SAP as well as other systems that also require content transformation services.

2. Content transformation demand for a single point-solution can be very high for a short period of time but can be low relative to the overall system capacity resulting in a system that is underutilized. This creates a significant cost saving opportunity by implementing a single platform deployed across the enterprise that meets the demand for all point-solutions.

Adlib set forth to meet this market demand; we engaged in a co-development project with one of our largest customers to deliver an enterprise content transformation platform. Together, we identified the following high-level requirements:

• Make the platform highly scalable in order to meet the enterprise throughput demand
• Architect the platform to support high availability to achieve the enterprise Service level Agreement (SLA) since content transformation is often mission critical
• Make it simple to integrate the platform into existing IT infrastructure
• Make the platform highly configurable to eliminate having to develop custom code  and make it easily to adapt to changing business needs
• Incorporate system component monitoring and alerting in order to notify IT of failure so corrective actions can be taken in a timely fashion to maintain business continuity
• Include system reporting in order to confirm system performance such as meeting Service Level Agreement (SLA) and identifying system load for future capacity planning
• Allows the system  to be configured as a platform to reduce configuration errors and simplify system expansion
• Reduce day-to-day system management effort

Each of the above requirements will be elaborated on in separate blog posts to further describe why these are important to enterprises. Many of these requirements are congruent with the 2010  IDC report, “Embedding Additional Value into Applications: What Enterprises Need Most from Application Vendors.”

We hope you enjoy this technical blog series and would like to know if you seek the same type of capabilities we discuss here … leave us your comments below.