ECM Platforms Whitepaper & E-book

8/3/2019 ECM Platforms Whitepaper & E-book

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Content Management Platforms:the next generation of EnterpriseContent Management

The Evolution of ECM: Platform Oriented, Flexible, Architected for the Cloud and Designed for Technologists

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...................................................................................................Executive Summary 3

........................Defining Enterprise Content and Enterprise Content Management 4

........................................................................................Enterprise Content Trends 8

..............................Requirements and Challenges for a Modern Content Platform 15

......................................................................Standards Matter, but Don't Be Blind 24

........................................................................................................................Interoperability 25

..................................................................................................................................Metadata 27

..............................................................Other Non-Content Related Standards That Matter 28

....The Business Case for Adopting a Platform Approach to Content Applications

31.........................................Nuxeo's Enterprise Platform: a Modern ECM Platform 37

................................................................................................................Conclusion 39






Executive Summary

Scope and Goals

This document is intended for technology leaders and influencers who are involved in the

selection of solutions for managing enterprise content. The document provides readers a detailed

understanding of how organizational needs for managing enterprise content are evolving, and

why it is critical to implement processes and tools that are sufficiently flexible to support these

rapid changes – now.

• After reading this white paper, you should understand:

• What is meant by the terms “enterprise content” and “enterprise content management”.

• How enterprise content and organizational needs for managing that content are evolving.

• Why it is important to have tools based on a strong technology platform that support

information and processes of increasingly diverse types, complexity and size.

• Technologies and standards for supporting enterprise content management (ECM) in a process-

centric manner.

• How to create the business case for adopting a platform for building content-driven solutions.

Target Audience

The ideal reader is in a software, solution or enterprise architecture role and makes or influences

decisions about development frameworks, enterprise content management systems or other

content-centric platforms. The reader should have a general understanding of enterprise content

management concepts, but is not expected to have detailed understanding of any specificenterprise content management process, application, framework or platform.






Defining Enterprise Content and

Enterprise Content Management

What Is Enterprise Content Management?

Organizations are becoming more conscious of the worth of the content they have and the value

of being able to utilize this content effectively. This is precisely what ECM addresses. ECM is

aimed at managing the life cycle of information from its creation to archival and disposal.

According to the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM):

“ECM is the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store,

preserve and deliver content and documents related to organizational

processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an

organization's structured and unstructured information, wherever that

information exists.” (AIIM, 2011)

Although many may assume ECM is just a technology solution, it is not. ECM also includes any

operational or strategic processes that rely on content in addition to the tools and technologyused to support them.

The first decade of the 21st century has caused “organizational processes” to evolve far beyond

what many originally considered possible and content supports many of those processes. This

evolution has made ECM a critical component of the enterprise technology ecosystem.

Traditionally, technology solutions that support ECM provide capabilities such as:

• search

• collaboration

• business rules management

• workflow management

• document capture and scanning

• version management

• metadata enhancement






that help make access, delivery and management of information more controlled, efficient and

less costly. However, this list of features is evolving as ECM evolves – constantly adding new

requirements and growing more demanding, with a greater emphasis on integration and long

term flexibility.

Just like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) increases operational efficiency andcompetitiveness, standardizing processes like financial management, ECM allows organizations

to gain control over their content to accomplish organizational objectives.

What Is Enterprise Content?

The definition above provides a description of what it means to manage content, but what is the

“enterprise content” that is being managed? Enterprise content has evolved. It is no longer just

digitized versions of scanned documents or a narrowly-defined set of records. Enterprise contentmay include any type of content that an organization captures and uses in its daily processes,

from structured content in relational databases, XML documents or enterprise applications such

as customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM) or enterprise

resource planning (ERP) tools, to unstructured content such as text, emails, word processing and

spreadsheets.

Enterprise content is not limited to these items, however. Enterprise content may also include

multimedia such as images, video, voice mail, streaming media and newer forms of information

like geo-data that previously did not exist or occurred infrequently. Social media may also be

expanding its impact on enterprise content. However, at this point, the medium is used more

frequently for communication, collaboration and Web Engagement than for ECM use cases. In

short, enterprise content can be any piece of data, document, enterprise application content or

multimedia asset that is associated with an organizational business process, or any content that an

organization deems valuable enough to store and manage.

Enterprise content is at the heart of information systems – an important part of the processes

and models of the business. Enterprise content is no longer a static entity that exists beside

business logic; content co-exists with business logic. It is critical that platforms support content

types and metadata that are capable of accurately representing the complex relationships and

transactions that occur every day in the business to enable improvements in organizational

process.






Drivers for ECM Adoption

As early as the mid to late 1980’s, organizations were implementing stand-alone, tactical solutions

from vendors like FileNet, ViewStar and Lotus to capture paper documents and reduce the effort

and time required to find information. Businesses continue to adopt content management for

many of the same reasons they did over two decades ago, and the pace seems to be increasing.

According to the 2011 State of the ECM Industry by AIIM, there are a number of business

drivers for adoption of ECM:

Figure 1: Drivers for ECM Adoption (Miles, 2011)

The study also captured drivers for adopting new ECM systems:






Figure 2: Drivers for ECM Adoption (Miles, 2011)

Although this white paper will not go into details on each of the drivers for ECM adoption, it is

easy to see that each of the issues will benefit from the support of an ECM solution based on asolid technology platform.






Enterprise Content Trends

ECM: It's not Just File Shares as Content Tools

A number of solutions outside of ECM tools have emerged that allow sharing documents and

other content among multiple users such as DropBox, Box.net, shared file systems and Google

Docs. While these solutions support sharing, collaboration and limited security features, it is a

mistake to consider these tools holistic ECM solutions.

Modern ECM platforms are not just simple file shares and do not resemble early document

management solutions that were in many cases little more than user interfaces over a file share.

ECM platforms include a variety of capabilities such as:

• Version tracking

• Relationships between documents

• Support for document meta-data and/or semantic details

• Configurable document workflow and lifecycle management

• Check-in/check-out

• Content streaming

• Auditing and Traceability

• Business rules

that are often critical for organizations to manage content efficiently and are not supported by

popular file sharing tools. Additionally, an ECM platform must fulfill the requirements common

to all enterprise software, such as:

• Complex integration with name directories (e.g. LDAP)

• Capability to fit within a predefined enterprise technology portfolio and conform to

architectural standards, whether in the cloud or on premise

• High availability

which are also not supported by file sharing applications.

In general, file sharing applications are designed for independent, uncontrolled, unstructured

content and include few tools to support structural management (e.g. taxonomies) or to add

supporting meta-data. Further, although these tools support sharing, they do not support content






reuse across the enterprise and lack support for applying critical business rules, lifecycle

management or workflow to support content-centric business processes. Without the ability to

classify the content or to represent its relationships to other content in a uniform manner, content

becomes almost impossible to manage as the volume grows.

File sharing applications have another important limitation. As enterprise content becomes morediverse and includes multimedia assets such as video and audio, there is an increasing need to

support rich content and activities such as streaming – a feature the majority of file sharing tools

do not support. Older document management platforms also lack support for many of the newer

content types.

Finally, organizations with legal and regulatory constraints should be very careful about exposing

content using document-sharing solutions, since they do not provide high levels of security,

traceability or control. Even if legal requirements are not in place, exposing content perceived as

private can be a large blemish on the face of an organization.

The Evolution of ECM

Like all business processes and the technology that supports them, ECM is frequently changing to

introduce new models, concepts and meet new challenges. Traditionally, ECM technologies have

consisted of a number of independent solutions:

Figure 3: Traditional ECM functions






However, increasingly organizations desire more integration. They want content to be pervasive

and available on-demand wherever it’s required – not just within a specific standalone application

supporting a single use case. Organizations want content within the tools where and when they

do their work and manage their business processes without the necessity to access multiple tools

and follow numerous disconnected processes.

These business demands are driving a new, modern breed of ECM technology. ECM has evolved

from a departmental, siloed, single purpose solution to an enterprise-level infrastructure. These

modern ECM solutions go beyond commercial off the shelf (COTS) applications that perform a

specific function, such as document management, and even beyond integrated suites that

combine multiple functions. Modern ECM technology is not an application; it is an

interoperable, flexible content platform that exposes components and services that organizations

can easily integrate to support a diverse set of content-enabled business processes within

applications built on the platform. The new ideal ECM platform is transparent to users – only

the capabilities are important. The diagram below illustrates this evolution.

Figure 4: The Evolution of Content Management (Miles, 2011)

Content Diversity

Organizations are not only requiring content management solutions to be flexible enough to

support more business processes; ECM solutions must also support an increasing number of

content types. Organizations are increasingly leveraging new types of information to support

their operation. As organizations manage more types of enterprise content, they frequently have

concerns regarding the accuracy, trustworthiness and accessibility of the content.

A 2011 ECM survey by AIIM showed both the different types of content organizations manage

and the confidence leadership has in the quality of the management. This clearly highlights the






increasing diversity of content managed by applications, from core business content to content

more related to social collaboration.

Figure 5: How well is content managed (Miles, 2011)

Smart Content

In addition to content growing more diverse, in some cases it is becoming smarter. What does this

mean? Traditionally, content managed by ECM solutions consisted largely of files and scannedimages perhaps interpreted with simplistic optical character recognition (OCR) and very limited

metadata. Today however, modern ECM platforms must be more sophisticated. They must

support interpretation of the actual contents of the document and assign meaning to the data it

contains . This “smart content” allows organizations to go beyond just storing a binary file with

limited metadata for viewing and instead associate relationships, complex metadata and business

rules to automate business processes. For example, an organization scans an invoice. ECM

technology can extract the invoice number and use it to relate the invoice to information in other






enterprise applications (e.g. a customer service system) so that users gain a more holistic view of

the information and business rules can be applied.

Figure 6: The Evolution of Content

ECM solutions are also augmenting content with growing amounts of metadata, such as version

number and security descriptors, that may be useful in making management even more efficient.

Metadata is no longer just informational to the reader; it is now one of the variables driving the

business process.

Big Data Is Big Content Not only is content becoming more diverse and smarter, it is growing at an almost inconceivable

pace. Companies are capturing increasing volumes of data about customers, suppliers and

operations generated because of other activities. The McKinsey Global Institute projects data

will grow at a rate of 40% per year (Manyika, et al., 2011) driven by an explosion of content,

social media, mobile, video and other rich media combined with cheaper storage and trends such

as cloud computing that encourage organizations to save everything. IDC has projected even

higher content growth rates. IDC predicts that the amount of digital information produced

worldwide in 2011 will be 10 times that produced in 2006. This makes for a compound annual

growth rate of close to 60% (Chute, Manfrediz, Minton, Reinsel, Schlichting, & Toncheva,

2008).






Figure 7: Organizational Unit Content Growth

(Chute, Manfrediz, Minton, Reinsel, Schlichting, & Toncheva, 2008)

Content growth might have previously only concerned a few niche areas, but it now impacts

every sector and organization and is quickly becoming a way for leading companies to

outperform their peers as they gain new insights from stored information. For example, according

to the McKinsey Global Institute, 30% of Amazon. com sales are driven by product

recommendations based on users’ previous purchases (Manyika, et al., 2011). If this information

is managed as enterprise content, it can be leveraged in other content driven processes beyond

sales recommendations.

The ability to analyze and gain insight on larger volumes of information due to more

sophisticated ECM technology has a number of benefits:

• Transparency: Making content more easily accessible to stakeholders exactly when and where

they need it. This reduces the time and effort required to locate information, and it can

improve performance.

• Data Driven Decision Making: Companies are collecting increasing amount of information

from sensor data that can be used for making decisions in a more quantitative and predictable

way. For example, capturing the length of time in a case management workflow can inform an

organization which portion of the process is most lengthy or most expensive. The data can also

be used in controlled experiments to determine the impact of making changes.






• Customer Segmentation: As technology improves, organizations are better able to develop

unique customer profiles to engage them more specifically. For example, they can consolidate

information from CRM systems with unstructured emails and social media interactions to

create a more complete understanding of customer needs across all channels.

• Automated Decision Making: Access to content can provide all of the information necessary toautomate decisions previously made by humans, reducing operational costs. Even if companies

don’t automate decisions completely, content can be used to facilitate decision making. In

claims processing, for example, instead of going to multiple systems, enterprise content

management could allow staff to see all relevant documents from a single interface, improving

the efficiency of the process.

• Identifying New Business Models, Products and Services: Aggregated content and its analysis

presents innumerable new business opportunities from real time price comparison services to

preventative care solutions in the health care sector.

Although the additional data is valuable, organizations are still struggling with their attempts tomanage, store and derive value from the content. In many cases, as content sizes grow, so does

the complexity and cost associated with managing the content.

Legacy techniques of managing information are no longer sufficient with growing volumes of

content. Users simply can’t browse categories, or in some cases search, the massive amounts of

content stored in the enterprise – it’s too overwhelming. Growing content sizes make adoption of

new content processes and technologies essential. From cloud-based storage to semantic

technologies that improve the amount machines are able to assist users – content growth is

transforming the entire ECM space.






Requirements and Challenges for a

Modern Content Platform

Enabling Content-Driven Processes and Applications

Some organizations have made significant advances in leveraging ECM tools. However, in most

cases, use of the technology is still not optimal. Why? Many still consider ECM a stand-alone tool

instead of a middleware component that provides services capable of supporting an extremely

diverse set of business functions from invoicing to case management.

For example, a human resources department may need a technology solution to assist inexecuting the new hire process. This is a content centric process. A resume, a potential employee

profile and interview feedback are all potential content types. The scenario may be even more

complex. There may be a requirement to automatically provision an accepted candidate in the

user directory, or integrate with a web content management system or other business processes.

No “boxed” ECM application is likely to meet these requirements perfectly. This is a content-

driven application. Instead of custom developing a solution using a lower level framework (e.g.

Hibernate for persistence) the organization could benefit from the capabilities of a content

platform for managing the process.

Figure 8: Architecture Pattern for Content Driven Applications






Although electing to adopt a content platform versus a traditional ECM application has a

number of benefits, some architects may question how to best integrate the components into

their technology portfolio. The diagram above illustrates one possible architectural model for

organizing content-driven applications using content platform components.

In this model, the ECM platform exposes services such as workflow, authentication and accesscontrol and auditing via one or more interfaces that can be used to build custom content

applications or integrate with existing packaged and enterprise applications. In addition, the

content platform also provides direct access to stored content via standards-based interfaces

(repository services). The content platform can be used to build content-enabled applications that

leverage either the content directly or the set of high-level services provided by the content

platform.

In this model, a user interface layer offers frameworks to expose its services to different user

interface technologies. These frameworks can be leveraged to create custom interfaces from the

platform that adapt to the organizational context, making user adoption smoother and reducing

the user learning curve.

A platform should be architected in a modular and flexible manner. It should expose an entire

framework for use by developers, and not simply a content repository. Many ECM tools tend to

be architected around the content repository only, providing no additional layers. This is a more

traditional approach, inherited from the client-server era.

A platform should also provide a comprehensive set of services, from low-level directory services

to high level user interface services. This is the design of a platform that supports integration. It is

designed to be extended and assembled by developers making solutions from the platform.

Whether this model is implemented or an alternate ECM design strategy, a componentized,platform centric approach is the key to delivering truly flexible ECM. ECM evaluations and

adoption discussions should move away from specific applications and functional

implementations that assume requirements and toward one of content frameworks that can be

easily customized and extended at the repository, platform and user interface level to work in the

manner that is most appropriate to meet organizational needs.

Providing Modularity and Extensibility

No vendor can anticipate every use case that must be supported for managing enterprise content.

New content types, standards and business models are constantly being developed; therefore, it is

important to select an ECM platform that is architected for interoperability, customization and

extension – not something all vendors support. Lack of extensibility can have a direct impact on

business capabilities. Over half of businesses indicate that lack of ECM tool support for their






requirements is restricting their ECM adoption (Miles, 2011). The chart below illustrates some of

the reasons supplied:

Figure 9: Reasons for Inability to Meet ECM Vision

A well-designed ECM platform will support extensibility and customization in a manner that is

predictable, sustainable and affordable. Let’s explore what this means.

At a minimum, a well-designed content platform should be modular, component oriented and

deliver functionality as a set of independent, decoupled features (services) with few dependencies

between the components or to the technical environment. This design allows architects to choose

the precise set of features and services necessary to meet project requirements. In addition, the

platform should have an exposed API that can be used to access platform services without

“hacking,” engaging specialty vendor resources or purchasing add-on products. Other platform

features to support a sustainable model for building ECM applications include:

• Testability: The platform should support testing extensions/customizations without being

overly cumbersome. Ideally, the platform should easily integrate with a testing platform and

allow continuous integration so that the functional and non-functional (e.g. performance)

aspects of customizations/extensions can be verified. Solutions such as the Hudson and Jenkins

continuous integration servers have grown more popular, and ideally an ECM platform shouldenable teams to leverage these tools.

• Multiple API Strategies: An extensible ECM platform should expose multiple application

programming interfaces (API) to allow the project needs to dictate the integration strategy.

Ideally, the platform should provide multiple strategies such as native language (e.g. Java API),

REST, SOAP, or standards-based interfaces for accessing the underlying ECM features






• Support for standard languages such as Java, PHP or others as opposed to proprietary, vendor-

specific languages. Some vendors may elect to implement support for recently introduced “hot

languages” to generate interest in their products. Architects should carefully evaluate the value

of the languages supported for factors such as adoption of the language, size of the developer

community, the intrinsic qualities of the language and the staff ’s ability to support applications

written in the language.

• Consistent internal developer and client API: A consistent and supported mechanism for

extension by internal (vendor) development and external developers, which enables customer

extensions to look and function extactly like native vendor features. Vendors should support this

mechanism beyond a single release and have an upgrade path that makes it possible to benefit

from new releases without jettisoning their investment in customization and extensions

development.

• Deployment: The ECM platform should support multiple deployment strategies, from simplistic

single server to high-availability active/active and disaster recovery, from on premise to cloud-

based. It should support complex deployment configurations designed for application validation

(e.g. test to staging to production). In addition, the platform should allow deployment of

customizations and extensions in a predictable and controlled way across all environments

without impacting core platform functionality.

• Performance Benchmarking: The platform should have regular benchmark data published and

allow teams in charge of implementation to define their own performance tests based on their

specific use cases and application needs.

Supporting More Than Just the Server Side

Frequently, developers, architects and project managers evaluating enterprise applications focus

on the server side features of the architecture. They examine how business data persistence is

implemented, how business logic is designed and what APIs are available for integration.

However, client side features are just as important as the server side. When evaluating an ECM

platform, it is important to consider more than just the core capabilities encompassed in server-

based components. Architects should also ensure that the platform does not impose excessive

restrictions on the user interface the end user will leverage to access the application content

delivery and/or the content delivery of the content itself.

ECM platforms should easily support multi-channel content delivery and interaction. This

capability is growing even more critical as businesses increasingly embrace mobile devices, tablets

and other tools in addition to browser and rich-client applications that run on P.Cs. Ideally, the

platform will provide or allow integration with one or more presentation frameworks to support

rapid application development:






• A range of different web user interface frameworks for different interaction use cases (e.g. JSF,

GWT, basic web templating, etc.) to ensure all kinds of web applications, including mobile and

tablet based user interfaces, can be served in the most appropriate manner.

• RIA (Rich Internet Applications) frameworks supporting Flex and related middleware such as

Adobe Life Cycle or Granite DS, to ease the development of these interfaces.

• “Silent Applications” for scripting and batch processing purposes.

• Desktop applications

• Thick mobile applications, supporting major technology such as Android and iOS, and

providing dedicated SDKs to wrap the platform services and APIs.

Figure 10: Multi-Channel Content Delivery

Running Anywhere, Including the Cloud

Traditional enterprise software was designed to run on premise, and still today, a large share of

ECM solutions are running on premise, managed by internal IT operations. In this scenario, it is

important to leverage standard middleware. For example, in terms of Java technology, it should

be possible to install the entire solution on a standard Java Application Servers such as the lean Apache Tomcat servlet engine, JBoss application servers or other standard infrastructure without

requesting additional specialized components to meet the requirements of the ECM or its

supporting components. The same considerations are important regarding the underlying

database. “Release where you want and how you want” should be the motto. This enables

companies to achieve better ROI by allowing them to share and leverage their existing

investments in a single uniform stack.






Traditional solutions and platforms often fail in this area. Many require specific setups, specific

systems and in the end, almost dedicated maintenance and operational processes that result in

additional costs for organizations.

Beyond traditional on-premise environments, cloud computing has brought a large range of

opportunities and promises. Cloud computing has democratized technology for manyorganizations. Instead of hiring specialized staff and making large infrastructure and software

investments, organizations can obtain the same capabilities for a low start-up fee and a monthly

or usage-based subscription fee.

Cloud-based platforms allow architects to design sophisticated, reliable, and highly available

enterprise content solutions without concern for:

• Installation dependencies

• Computing storage capacities

• Upgrade paths

• Software configurations

• Hardware investments

• Future scalability

that could constrain architecture and design decisions. Cloud computing is usually segmented

into the following layers:

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): IaaS is the lowest level of abstraction in the cloud

technology stack. IaaS provides operating system support, storage and processing. Vendors inthis sector include Windows Azure and Amazon EC2.

• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): PaaS is essentially the middleware of the cloud. It is more

abstract than the IaaS layer and provides components, an environment and frameworks for

building higher-level applications. Vendors in this space include Heroku and CloudBees.

• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): SaaS is usually the highest level of the cloud stack and

includes complete application solutions designed to be leveraged by end users such as web mail

and Google Apps.

Forrester Research illustrates the cloud taxonomy as:






Figure 11: Cloud Computing Taxonomy

Although SaaS is currently the most prolific use for cloud computing, PaaS adoption is growing;

it is estimated that the market will grow to 11.91 billions $ in the next decade (), driven by

organizations seeking to reduce technology costs while simultaneously improving services.

ECM technology, like almost every other technology, has been impacted by cloud computing.

However, it should not be assumed that ECM solutions can seamlessly transition to the cloud.

Many ECM tools have a number of characteristics that make utilization in a cloud difficult, if not impossible. For example, many ECM vendors have built their solutions through acquisition or

independent product development cycles that don’t share a common architecture and have not

(and may never) standardize environmental requirements, resulting in a tool with a dizzying

number of external dependencies that cannot be supported in most standardized cloud

environments.

The first thoughts of ECM in the cloud may point to SaaS. While this is a valid option, the

reality is that an ECM platform must enable use of all layers of the cloud stack:

• IaaS: Allow organizations that are already taking advantage of hosted infrastructure to

continue to use it without requiring specialized environment configurations that make cloudhosting impractical.

• PaaS: Leverage the fantastic promises of the approach, as it’s all about delivering frameworks

and components that can be customized, but abstracting from the complexity of the lower

infrastructure level – a very good match for the modern ECM platform, as depicted before.






• SaaS: A significant portion of users of the ECM platform will deliver their applications in this

manner, asking for all the technical requirements that it implies:

• Elastic resource allocation

• Multi-tenancy

• Security and privacy

• Monitoring of large scale implementations.

Beyond allowing all three approaches to cloud-computing, a good technical platform should

make it easy to move from one mode to another, and also to switch between deployment options

without significant effort, high cost or lengthy time to market.

When considering a new ECM technology, it is important to consider more than just a “supports

the cloud” check-box on an RFP. Cloud support is not a simple YES/NO question; cloud

requirements and capabilities vary and should be examined in detail. It is not sufficient to rely on

the shiny “Cloud based” marketing collateral.

Modern Development: Agile and Soon in the Cloud

The new requirements of ECM mean that “out of the box” solutions are no longer sufficient.

Content-driven applications have a level of uniqueness that requires most organizations to set up

a development team to configure, develop, maintain and deploy the solution. While the

complexity and cost of this might be a concern, using modern software methodologies, tooling and a well-designed software framework can dramatically minimize the delivery effort.

A set of best practices can ensure higher quality solutions with a lower cost of implementation

than traditional software delivery approaches:

• Adopt Agile and iterative development practices. Embrace the “release early, release

often” approach. These practices have been shown to reduce delivery risk compared to

traditional predictive project management practices.

• Implement continuous integration. Building at every change ensures that changes in the

code base that have a negative impact are identified early, before they can cause additional

issues.

• Implement automatic testing. This reduces the time, effort and cost of testing and ensures

that a full regression suite is always available to confirm the validity of software changes.

• Use modern tools and techniques for source control (e.g. Git) that provide developers

with more efficiency than traditional tools that lock entire files while a single developer makes






changes. This newer breed of source control tools also enables truly distributed development –

something that was challenging and expensive with earlier solutions.

• Implement continuous and automatic performance testing/benchmarking . This

establishes baselines for the solution so that the team can easily identify any changes that

substantially impact performance.

• Implement continuous deployment . Continuous deployment automates the deployment

process and reduces the time required to perform tasks and the risk of missing critical steps.

IaaS, SaaS and PaaS are now almost well-established areas for the cloud, but an additional area

is emerging – development in the cloud. Cloud-based development rounds out the cloud-

computing environment, allowing organizations to not only use (SaaS), assemble (PaaS) and run

(IaaS), but actually build software remotely. In the current environment of “everything as a

service,” it isn’t a stretch to assert that development as a service will be the next frontier of the

cloud to experience growth.

Development in the cloud has many of the same benefits as other cloud-based offerings, such as

lower acquisition cost, faster adoption, simpler setup and configuration and reduced

management and maintenance effort. A number of cloud-based IDEs have been recently

introduced, such as Eclipse’s Orion, Nuxeo Studio for the Nuxeo Platform and the popular

Salesforce Force.com which provides solution designers a high-level abstraction from the actual

source code. However, development in the cloud isn’t just about the integrated development

environment (IDE). To be truly holistic, development-as-a-service must support the entire

develop-to-deploy lifecycle, which includes:

• Code creation

• Compilation

• Source control

• Continuous Integration

• Automated Development Testing

• Deployment to multiple deployment targets

This model is illustrated below and is already being offered by products such as VMWare’s

Code2Cloud and CloudBees’ Dev@Cloud. An ideal ECM platform must embrace this

development model, not provide barriers to adoption, like many tools built with legacyarchitectures.






Figure 12: Development as a Service

Development-as-a-service is still in its earliest stages; a lot of evolutions must occur before the full

development cycle is supported in the cloud. However, there is already real value in adopting this

new approach toward development, when you can combine and integrate a cloud-based

development environment with an on-premise development infrastructure, such as the

continuous integration chain and the deployment process.

Standards Matter, but Don't Be Blind

Why Standards?

Non-technical users really don’t care about which standards exist and which are emerging. They

care that platforms play well together; they want interoperability. They want solutions that can

communicate with each other without excessive effort and cost. They want to be able to move

content between platforms if a new tool is selected. It could be said that standards in the ECMspace are more about avoiding content lock-in than vendor lock-in.

Standards provide a set of guidelines and mechanisms for interacting with a technology.

Adoption of standards has a number of benefits, with the most frequently cited being

interoperability. No organization wants to be tied to a single vendor or product option for

implementing a technology solution – no matter how well the vendor’s solution functions or the

vendor provides service. Standards adoption has a number of additional benefits such as:






• Lower the technology adoption costs

• Increased development consistency, simplicity and predictability

• Improved code reuse

• Reduced cost, time and effort to transition between vendors and solutions

• Reduced focus on commodity and infrastructure

• Ability to create composite interfaces that are tailored to the needs of specific job roles –

mashability

• Improved application portability

• Enable faster time to market because it is easier to purchase off the shelf components and

applications that can integrate and provide features for the solution

Organizations should understand which standards provide the benefits that are most important

for their needs when adopting an ECM solution.

Existing and Emerging Standards

They say the good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose. This may be

humorous, but seasoned technologists know that, unfortunately, the quip has some truth – the

world of enterprise content management is no different. There is no single standard that is more

important than all others. There is no universal definition of what is most valuable; it always varies by the unique technical and business needs of the organization.

Not every ECM vendor and product will support every standard. However, it is important to

determine the standards that are most important for future business and technical strategy and

ensure they are supported by the potential ECM platform. For example, an organization

concerned with the publishing industry might have a strong interest in adopting the NewsML

standard, whereas an organization with more generic and horizontal coverage might have more

interest in supporting Content Management Interoperability Standard.

Standards impact a number of areas in the ECM market and it is important that these be

understood.

INTEROPERABILITY

As noted above, interoperability is one of the primary drivers for standards adoption.

Interoperability takes many forms. In ECM, interoperability is primarily targeted at providing a

standardized way for content-based applications to share their content assets.






The main standards related to interoperability for ECM solutions include Content Management

Interoperability Services (CMIS) and Java Content Repository (JCR). CMIS has grown slightly

more popular than JCR due to the technology agnostic approach taken by the standard.

CMIS is one of the most recent standards in the content management space; it was specifically

designed to support interoperability among ECM solutions. Officially adopted in May 2010,managed by OASIS, and supported by a large number of vendors, the standard defines a vendor

agnostic domain model, a protocol abstraction and a set of bindings that allow the sharing and

accessing content across multiple ECM tools. Key services provided by CMIS include:

• Repository Services: Enable information discovery of the content repository and the object

types defined for the repository

• Navigation Services: Supports navigating the folder hierarchy in a CMIS repository

• Object Services: Enables management of repository objects (Create, Retrieve, Update,

Delete)

• Discovery Services: To search for objects in a repository

• Versioning Services: To manage the lifecycle of repository items.

A number of vendors have dedicated themselves to moving the CMIS standard forward. An

example of this is are the Apache Foundation CMIS protocol implementations, developed within

the Apache Chemistry project, with support of developers from various content management

vendors, such as Adobe and Nuxeo. Another notable effort is the contribution by Nuxeo of its

content repository code to Eclipse, demonstrating their willingness to work on a reference

implementation of CMIS in a content repository. The project, originally called “Eclipse

Enterprise Content Repository”, has been officially approved by Eclipse and was rebranded“Apricot." It relies on the Apache Chemistry project.

Other official or de facto interoperability standards that architects may want to explore because

they could impact the overall ECM solution interoperability include:

• Windows SharePoint Services ( WSS ): Not actually a standard, but a set of services for accessing

content in Microsoft’s SharePoint products.

• Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning ( WebDAV ): a HTTP-based standard that

facilitates collaboration between users in editing and managing documents and files stored on

web servers.

• Java Content Repository ( JCR ): a low-level Java specification, although adapters have been

created for other languages, defined under the Java Community Process.

• Common Internet File System ( CIFS ): a protocol that allows applications to make requests for

files and services on remote computers via the Internet.






METADATA

Metadata augments content stored by ECM solutions with additional details such as taxonomy,

relationships, security attributes, usage characteristics, auditing information, and any number of

additional attributes. How important is metadata to an ECM solution? It is critical. Without

metadata, it becomes almost impossible to manage, maintain control and find content in anECM tool. There are a number of standards that impact metadata creation and management

within ECM solutions such as XML, Dublin Core and semantic technology related standards

(e.g. RDF). Support for some of these standards, like Dublin Core, is important, but not sufficient

for solving all ECM metadata needs. Keep in mind that many standards that address taxonomies

and semantic technologies are still maturing, so adopting a platform with the flexibility to support

the standard in the future will be key.

The most important standard, although it is a much lower level standard than many of the others

discussed in this white paper, is without a doubt XML. The Extensible Markup Language (XML)

is a standard managed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The human and machine-readable text-based markup language, similar to HTML, is now familiar to most technologists.

Unlike HTML, XML does not have a single defined set of tags and attributes; it allows adopters

to define their own elements or utilize a vocabulary defined by another party. XML is a core

technology for defining structured content and data, and of course, metadata; it is the foundation

for a number of other standards like Dublin Core and XMP.

XML has been such a core technology that almost all vendors will promise support. However,

like with computing, architects must examine what “support” means. Not all vendors fully

support XML equally for integration and transformation, storage and publishing. Architects

should explore in detail the XML capabilities of an ECM platform when it comes to managing,

storing and processing XML-based data.

Another domain that is mentioned more frequently related to metadata is semantic technology.

Semantic technology allows association of meaning or context to digital content – not just

meaning for people – but for computers as well. If computers can learn the meaning behind

content, they can learn what users are interested in and provide assistance with common tasks,

such as search or augmenting data with existing details based on known relationships. Without

semantic technology, content is typically just links between structured and unstructured resources.

Semantic technology provides context to these resources and their relationships so that machines

can recognize entities such as people, places, events, organizations, etc. within the content.

Support for semantic technologies is limited in the majority of ECM platforms, although some

forward thinking vendors are beginning to incorporate the technology. If semantic technology

lives up to its promises, the enhancements it provides for metadata, categorization and content

enrichment will substantially improve ECM technology. This can be seen in research and open

source projects like the Interactive Knowledge Stack (IKS) project. IKS is an European Union-

funded research project involving vendors like Nuxeo and Adobe, focused on building an open

and flexible technology platform for semantically enhanced content management. IKS has






resulted in several Open Source projects, such as the Apache Stanbol project, which provides a

connection between Semantic Web data sources and traditional content management solutions.

The growth of Public Open Data (as illustrated by the W3C SWEO Linking Open Data

community project in figure 13) is clearly advocating for this kind of initiative, bridging

traditional ECM and Semantic Web technology. The use of a modular ECM platform will no

doubt make this easier!

Figure 13: Linked Open Data

OTHER NON-CONTENT RELATED STANDARDS THAT M ATTER

Technology and development languages are evolving and there is a range of technical standards

that are “must-have” and high value for a modern content development platform.

OpenSocial is one of them. OpenSocial was originally created as an open specification for

accessing and sharing user profile, relationship and activity data across social networking sites,

instead of working with the proprietary interfaces each site offered. However, its adoption has

now grown beyond social networks into the enterprise, to provide a general-purpose web

application integration technology. It is especially practical for creating dashboards where end

users can find information from different applications in one place.






OpenSocial is comprised of two high-level concepts: gadgets and APIs. Gadgets are small,

pluggable, HTML/JavaScript based components with a basic lifecycle that run in containers

responsible for providing the gadget with the rendering environment and JavaScript APIs. The

core OpenSocial APIs provide capabilities for managing people, activities and data and are

exposed via JavaScript and REST. OpenSocial gadgets can also be used to provide a simple and

light integration solution between applications, and they can access any piece of information inthe enterprise that is exposed via REST.

In addition to the existing capabilities of OpenSocial, there are efforts underway to provide

tighter integration between OpenSocial and CMIS; the changes are targeted for version 2.0 of

the OpenSocial specification.

There are a number of additional standards not directly related to content that are important for

ECM development, such as OAuth, REST and LDAP. Each of these technologies can play an

important role in solution delivery.

OAuth is an open protocol standard for delegated authentication. It provides a standard way fordevelopers to offer their services via an API without forcing their users to expose their credentials.

From a user perspective, the standard allows a user (resource owner) to grant access to a

protected resource from one application (service provider) to another application (service

consumer). OAuth is a form of delegated authentication, which enables a single identity to be

shared across multiple sites without sharing credentials. In addition to providing a standard way

to grant access between applications, OAuth also provides a mechanism to restrict the scope and

lifetime of a service consumer’s authentication. This is a much more secure strategy than sharing

credentials and granting unlimited access to a third party. It is also convenient for users, who are

freed from creating more login credentials. Prior to OAuth, there were a number of other

proprietary internet authentication protocols. Unlike many of these earlier protocols, OAuthsupports use by non-web based applications.

Given that enterprise content is core to many business processes, it is important that a well-

designed platform provide a standard way to control access to its services. Instead of reinventing

the wheel, vendors like Nuxeo are integrating OAuth in their platforms to control which services

and data are shared between applications.

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is another protocol standard architects should

consider. The LDAP protocol allows applications to access information stored in an LDAP server.

LDAP servers can store any type of information, but they are most frequently used to store

contact information, security credentials and group information. The majority of organizationsthat support secured access to resources or email store user information in an LDAP directory.

LDAP servers are so common, ECM platforms should support integration, at least at a read level,

with LDAP servers so that user information does not have to be replicated in multiple locations.

Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style based on how the web works, not

a standard for application integration. RESTful interactions involve two components - clients and

servers. Clients make stateless requests to servers; servers receive requests, process them and






return a response. Requests and responses transfer representations of resources. A resource is any

object at an address (URI) that can provide information or have an operation executed against it.

Given the growing popularity of RESTful style services, architects that have embraced this style

of integration should carefully examine which services a platform exposes via REST. Some

vendors indicate they support REST, but have very limited features exposed.

And finally, at a lower level, standards like OSGi are concretely delivering software modularity

and extensibility. Technology architects who are still associating the Java technology to the heavy

and hard to extend early versions of J2EE should definitely consider exploring OSGi. It provides

the Java stack with a new approach to modularity and extensibility. Software like the Eclipse

Equinox project, the Spring Java development framework and Nuxeo’s platform extension point

system are leading the way, and demonstrating the value of modularity, extensibility and

component-driven software architecture.






The Business Case for Adopting a

Platform Approach to Content

ApplicationsMost architects know, or at least suspect, that implementing a platform centric approach to

building content-driven applications has some organizational value. Ad-hoc processes, multiple

tools and inconsistent practices are rarely in the best interest of any enterprise. However, “just

trust me” is typically not a sufficient justification for an executive to champion changing business

processes, introducing or changing staffing and/or investing in new technology platforms.

It is critical that architects define or contribute to the definition of a business case. What is a

business case? A business case justifies the rationale for architectural recommendations in a

cohesive and compelling manner. A well-defined business case should include qualitative reasons,

and if possible a quantitative justification, or return on investment (ROI) for undertaking a

project – not just the technical perspective.

The following sections present a sample model for calculating ROI and general (qualitative)

benefits of using a platform to manage enterprise content.

Qualitative Reasons

Implementing a platform approach to building content driven applications has a number of

benefits such as:

• Reduced training needs for technical resources, since a single approach is in use throughout the

enterprise. Architects, developers and designers can learn the strengths, weaknesses, features,

constraints and interfaces once and build numerous applications. This allows the resources to

focus on delivering high-value features instead of learning vendor tools.

• Improved content reuse and consistency

• Lower costs due to a reduced number of tools required to support the requisite use cases

• Reduced time to market, since a consistent tool is being used to deliver multiple applications.

Keep in mind these are only generalized benefits. An effort should be made to identify the

benefits specific to the organization adopting the ECM platform.






Calculating ROI

Adopting an enterprise content management (ECM) platform may mean significant

organizational investment. And, like any investment, it is important to understand when the

acquisition will pay for itself – ROI. A number of techniques can be used for calculating the

return on investment (ROI), however, a simplistic approach involves identifying the benefit of

implementing the new solution, quantifying each benefit and deducting the cost. The categories

below include sample benefit and cost areas. They will vary for each organization/project.

Figure 14: Benefit and Cost Categories

In addition to identifying costs and benefits, you may want to segment one-time items from

recurring items (e.g. annually) to depict initial ROI with reoccurring ROI or project ROI within a

time-frame.

Sample ROI Calculation

The following tables depict an organization’s ROI estimates for delivering three applications

using a single purpose application to deliver a business solution versus leveraging a content

platform. In this example, the applications can all be classified as content-centric applications.






• Project A is a generic Document Management project to serve the organization's requirements

for managing internal documents.

• Project B is a content application that is more process oriented; an implementation of an

extranet application to manage customer product returns. It must integrate with the ERP

system.

• Project C is a Digital Asset Management application for the Marketing and Communications

team.

This example assumes the “content platform” is open source, delivered under a subscription

model. Because of this, most of the software cost for the content platform approach are

operational, as opposed to large upfront CAPEX costs like the traditional packaged Document

Management and DAM solutions. Do not assume open source means free. It does not. Open

source has a cost, it’s just not an acquisition cost; the cost of open source is mostly in reoccurring

maintenance and support.

This fictional model can be used as a starting point for your own ROI analysis of adopting an

ECM platform. Keep in mind that to assess the true value of adopting an ECM platform, you

must look beyond a single project and examine the impact over time.

Project A: Internal Document Management

Specific approach, buying

software from a DM provider

With Content Platform

approach

CAPEX Consulting

(advisory, customization and

integration)

65,000 65,000

Internal

(process definition, training,

project management)

34,000 34,000

Software acquisition 45,000 0

Infrastructure setup 15,000 15,000

TOTAL 159,000 114,000

OPEX Year 1 17,600 37,600

Ongoing project cost

(enhancements, project

management)

24,000 16,000

Software maintenance &

support

10,000 30,000






Infrastructure 7,600 7,600

Year 2 35,600 49,600

Ongoing project cost 18,000 12,000


support

10,000 30,000


Year 3 45,600 55,600



support

10,000 30,000


TCO (on 3 years only) 257,800 256,800

Table 1: Example ROI Calculation - project A

Project B: Custome Return Processing

Specific approach,

developing the applicationfrom scratch, using a

development framework

Leveraging the Content

Platform used for project A

CAPEX Consulting

(advisory, customization andintegration)

80,000 60,000

Internal

(process definition, training,project management)

12,000 24,000


Infrastructure setup 15,000 2,000

TOTAL 110,000 86,000

OPEX Year 1 9,500 6,000


(enhancements, projectmanagement)

18,000 15,000


support

500 5,000


Year 2 22,500 15,000








support

500 5,000


Year 3 33,500 23,000Ongoing project cost 21,000 17,000


support

500 5,000


TCO (on 3 years only) 175,500 130,000

Table 2: Example ROI Calculation - project B

Project C: MarCom Dept igital Asset Management

Specific approach, buying

an out-of-the-box DAMsolution

Leveraging the Content

Platform used for project A

CAPEX Consulting

(advisory, customization andintegration)

5,000 5,000

Internal

(process definition, training,project management)

5,000 5,000


Infrastructure setup 14,000 0

TOTAL 84,000 10,000

OPEX Year 1 15,000 0


(enhancements, project

management)

0 0


support

10,000 0

Infrastructure 5,000 0

Year 2 15,000 0

Ongoing project cost 0 0







support

10,000 0


Year 3 15,000 0

Ongoing project cost 0 0Software maintenance &

support

10,000 0


TCO (on 3 years only) 129,000 10,000

Table 3: Example ROI Calculation - project C

Specific approach Platform approach

TOTAL Cost ofOwnership, all projects

562,300 USD 396,800 USD

Cost Reduction- 165,500 USD

Table 4: Example ROI Calculation - total

Although this model is purely fictional, it illustrates the value of adopting a content platform

instead of leveraging single-purpose applications or developing custom solutions. Notice that

consulting, infrastructure and software costs for the point solutions remain high over each

application implementation, while these costs decrease or are eliminated for subsequent

implementations using the ECM platform.






Nuxeo's Enterprise Platform: a

Modern ECM PlatformOpen source ECM vendor Nuxeo has taken a platform centric approach to delivering content

management capabilities (). Unlike traditional ECM tools, which provide a monolithic

application for managing content, Nuxeo provides a componentized solution, organized in logical

layers, that allows applications to be assembled. The diagram below presents a high-level view of

the Nuxeo ECM technology.

Figure 15: Nuxeo Architecture

Each layer of the modular architecture builds upon the services provided by the layer below. This

model allows an enormous amount of technical and business flexibility to create content-driven

applications with the specific features required to support the business process. Nuxeo’s

architecture supports a number of use cases:

• Customize the pre-built applications (Document Management, Digital Asset Management,

Case Management Framework)

• Customized Nuxeo deployment

• Application integration with the Nuxeo platform






Figure 16: Customizing the Nuxeo Platform

How is this possible from a single platform? The lowest level of the Nuxeo architecture is the

runtime. It is a container for other Nuxeo components and services similar to how Java provides a

runtime container or .Net has a common language runtime. On top of the runtime is a

lightweight CMIS compliant repository that can be embedded into other applications or used to

create a customized solution. Each layer adds additional capabilities that organizations can

optionally elect to implement.

In addition to a modular architecture, Nuxeo provides an extension point model that can be used

to:

• configure services and components

• extend existing platform services

as well as pre-packaged ECM applications that can be used as is or customized to meet enterprise

needs.

Nuxeo’s architectural strategy is one example of a modern ECM platform offering all of the

value and benefits described in this white paper. This is in contrast with strategies followed by

vendors that offer a suite of tools or a single-purpose application.






Conclusion After reading this white paper, you should now understand:

• What is meant by the terms “enterprise content” and “enterprise content management”.

• How enterprise content and organizational needs for managing that content are evolving.

• Why it is important to have processes and tools that support data of increasingly diverse

formats, complexity and size.

• The key standards that support ECM technology.

• Technologies and standards for supporting enterprise content management (ECM) in a process-

centric manner.

• How to create a business case for adopting a platform for building content-driven tools.

• Why it is necessary to adopt an ECM platform that doesn’t just allow delivery of a single pre-

defined use case, but instead offers IT teams an efficient and elegant way to build, customize

and maintain solutions that can evolve.

What You Can Expect When Adopting ECM

No matter what strategy is pursued to support enterprise content needs, it should not be expected

that all enterprise processes and issues can be addressed in a single project. Initially, organizations

should select one or more use cases, work with and understand the platform and use the lessons

learned in the next implementation. These quick wins are important for evangelism and

improving user adoption as well as learning for technical resources.

In addition, organizations should expect that content, standards and business needs will change

over time. They will need to regularly re-evaluate their ECM platform to determine if it is still

the best fit for organizational needs.






Works Cited

• Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), 2011. What Is ECM? Retrieved

06 10, 2011, from AIIM Website: http://www.aiim.org/What-is-ECM-Enterprise-Content-

Management.

• Miles, 2011. State of the ECM Industry 2011. AIIM.

• Manyika, et al., 2011. Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition and

Productivity. McKinsey Global Institute.

• Chute, Manfrediz, Minton, Reinsel, Schlichting, & Toncheva, 2008. An Updated Forecast of

Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011. IDC.

• Ried & Kisker, 2011. Sizing the Cloud. Forrester Research.

• Fermigier, Delprat, Grisel, Guillaume, 2010. Lessons learned developing the Nuxeo EP open source, component-based, ECM platform. Proceedings of the 2010 ICSSEA Conference.

Additional Resources

For additional information on items listed in the white paper, you can review the resources below.

• Oauth: http://www.oauth.net/

• Open Social: http://www.opensocial.org/

• W3C SWEO Linking Open Data: http://www.w3.org/wiki/SweoIG/TaskForces/

CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData

• OSGi: http://www.osgi.org/

• Jenkins/Hudson: http://java.net/projects/hudson/

• Apache Chemistry: http://chemistry.apache.org/

• Apache Stanbol: http://incubator.apache.org/stanbol/

• Interactive Knowledge Stack: http://www.iks-project.eu/


http://incubator.apache.org/stanbol/


http://java.net/projects/hudson/



http://www.osgi.org/

http://www.w3.org/wiki/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData


http://www.opensocial.org/

http://www.aiim.org/What-is-ECM-Enterprise-Content-Management



http://www.iks-project.eu/

http://www.iks-project.eu/















http://www.oauth.net/

http://www.oauth.net/







About Nuxeo -

Nuxeo provides an extensible and modular Platform for Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

enabling architects and developers to easily build and run business applications.

Designed by developers for developers, the Nuxeo Platform offers modern technologies,

unmatched modularity, a powerful plug-in model and extensive packaging capabilities. It comes

with ready-to-use applications for typical use cases such as Document Management. Digital Asset

Management and Case Management. Using a fully open source development model, Nuxeo

provides a subscription program with software maintenance, technical support and customization

tools.

1000+ organizations are relying on Nuxeo to run business critical applications, including

Electronic Arts, Intercontinental Hotels Group, Jeppesen, a Boeing Company, Orange and

Pearson Education. Nuxeo is dual-headquartered in North America (Boston) and WesternEurope (Paris).

More information is available at www.nuxeo.com. Or contact us: [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.nuxeo.com/

http://www.nuxeo.com/

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