Leveraging DocuSphere with an Existing Content Repository like Microsoft SharePoint via DocuSphere Repository Connectors
Do you have multiple content repositories in your organization? Chances are the answer is, “Yes.” Maybe it is only two, like a Documentum and a Filenet or perhaps you have multiple SharePoint sites. How does a company end up acquiring more than one content storage solution?
I spoke with the CIO of a medium-sized company recently, who had just been appointed to that position with this firm. We were discussing document management and he was bemoaning the fact that several years back, his new company had made it a corporate directive to go paperless. A surprising reaction on his part? Perhaps or perhaps not.
When asked why trying to go paperless was a problem, he replied that the initiative was undertaken without much planning – maybe none, he said. Basically, there were silos of documents and their metadata everywhere in the company. The Legal department had their system; Engineering bought a document management solution they liked; Human Resources (HR) decided they could not use either solution those departments had implemented and bought a product specific to their HR needs. And, through an acquisition, they had acquired a proprietary, legacy content engine. If that was not enough and to top it off, the former CIO purchased and deployed an early version of SharePoint (at the urging of end users needing content collaboration and storage) and it multiplied across the corporation, creating what he unflatteringly referred to as a “disconnected digital wasteland”.
If Legal and Engineering and HR have solutions that work for them, isn’t that a good thing? Certainly each group has some specific needs that were perhaps best met by the solution they implemented. This scenario is really not unusual as every department wants to deploy its line-of-business applications; and nearly every software company brings to the market its own content engine.
Additionally, with the growing use of SharePoint, companies multiply the overall number of content silos being used. You might conclude that this CIO’s concern was all about trying to support multiple content repositories and technologies from a technical perspective. Actually, he recognized that his company had a far bigger issue – content fragmentation (that’s a new term you can use at your next cocktail party). Simply put, content fragmentation means there is no easy way of finding related items in these technologically disparate (and isolated) repositories. This is more than just an inconvenience.
New laws regarding e-discovery make knowing where your documents are stored more than just a matter of convenience. Industry experts suggest that nearly 80% of content is unstructured and doubling every two years. The proliferation of digital documents combined with content fragmentation is an unavoidable and unstoppable market trend, and certainly one of the biggest challenges companies face in managing digital assets.
All content repositories have incompatibilities with each other.
The differences are as varied as the number of content systems. On the technical side, a large number of time-stratified technologies coexist in the enterprise; legacy applications are mixed in with new technologies. Each application has its own specific design, logic and user interface. Even the metadata is specific for each repository. Digital assets are therefore becoming more and more complex to access and work with. This problem affects companies of all sizes and across all industries, to varying degrees.
Achieving normalized access to content is possible with DocuSphere Repository Connectors
Consider the options available to deal with content fragmentation. You could attempt to choose only one content repository for the organization. This one size fits all approach doesn’t usually work very well as you must make some compromises along the way regarding features and functions needed by the users and departments. Plus, you would need to develop a plan to convert documents and metadata from current repositories into the new system and retrain users on how to work with the new repository user interface.
Here is another way – by implementing DocuSphere Repository Connectors, available for over 30 of the most popular content repositories in the industry. Besides offering a single point of access, DocuSphere Repository Connectors provide cross-repository features. For example, it can provide an easy way for applications to search in disparate content silos by acting as a search broker. Using only one normalized technology for all applications keeps complexity in check. The differences between applications are managed by the DocuSphere Repository Connectors. There are no longer different technologies required to access different content silos. DocuSphere Repository Connectors provide federated access for companies that have from one to many additional content repositories. Having standardized connectivity for all your repositories increases information access simplicity and efficiency.
Let’s look at a real world example
A construction firm has deployed Documentum for heavy document management usage and SharePoint as an employee-facing portal application for gathering employee timesheets and expense reports. They selected DocuSphere Accounts Payable Automation for streamlining Accounts Payable and integration with their Oracle ERP system. Rather than adding yet another content system, they also implement our DocuSphere Repository Connectors to enable these other repositories to share information with DocuSphere, all without requiring the users of Documentum or SharePoint to change the way they interact with those systems. Further benefits can be achieved by taking advantage of DocuSphere’s ability to monitor those repositories for new documents (like timesheets and expense reports) and launch approval workflow in DocuSphere to speed the capture of data needed for AP processing and upstream by the billing department. Content fragmentation solved!
DocuSphere Repository Connectors can help leverage the investment you have in various content solutions by helping you tame the content in these disparate repositories. For more information or to discuss getting the content in your enterprise under control, please Contact Us.
No comments