whitepaper

Content Management Platforms: The Next Generation of Enterprise Content Management

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

This whitepaper is an executive summary of the full ebook

Visit www.nuxeo.com/whitepaper to get the full paper

Available for download as a PDF or for ebook readers.
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Enterprise Content Management and Content Technology Trends

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions, a direct descendant of traditional Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS), have seen signicant changes since introduced in the late 90s, and more changes will come in the future. With the Digital Revolution brought by the Web and other Internet related domains, content technology is everywhere, beyond traditional Enterprise Content Management applications, constantly reinventing and challenging the established usage and solutions. This is a powerful driver for Enterprise Content Management, which is evolving to a next generation of technology and usage, continually providing more value to enterprises and organizations.

The Evolution of Content Management (Miles, 2011)

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Much More Than File Shares and Document-based Systems: Content-driven Business Applications
The rst generation of ECM solutions are direct descendants of Electronic Document Management Systems. In parallel, a new generation of le sharing systems also showed up (Dropbox, Box.net ...) But the problems organizations are trying to solve today are way beyond the limitations of these two families of solutions, they want and need: to incorporate content into business applications and business processes and not keep it in content only siloed applications. to usesmarter content, involving more agile uses of metadata and semantics, and a wide range content typologies. to be able to build tailor made content-enabled applications to run their business. to have the exibility to build and constantly evolve.

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Big Data, Big Content

While Big Data applies to a usually well delimited category of massive datasets, the reality is that today and tomorrow, all applications are impacted by the phenomenon of exponential data growth, both in number of records and content size, a natural consequence of the advent of Digital Media. In that context, the challenges for Enterprise Content Management technology are various: Scale and absorb the growth without performance or system management issues. Preserve transparency and accessibility to content always and by any means. Enable data mining, facilitate analysis and automated decision making. Support new business processes and added value from this massive amount of digital knowledge organizations are building. Traditional Enterprise Content Management solutions are struggling to try make the above possible, and often failing because they are not designed for that purpose!

Organizational Unit Content Growth (Chute, Manfrediz, Minton, Reinsel, Schlichting, & Toncheva, 2008)

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Requirements for a Modern Content Management Platform

Looking at the way Enterprise Content Management, and content management in general, are evolving, the best technology to meet the needs of organizations for today and tomorrow is a platform approach to use for building solutions, instead of out-of-the-box software solutions. But using the platform term is not enough, and as nothing is as simple as tagging a software box with this term, it is necessary to elaborate on what a platform is, from a technology standpoint, and what we should expect from it. Any software architect, technologist or IT decision maker involved in the process of choosing a software solution for a project with content management requirements should have a clear understanding of these requirements.

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Enabling the Building of Business Applications

To make this possible, as a development framework, a Content Management Platform must be Service Oriented, and provide access to its features, from low level to high level, through APIs, embracing as much as possible standard technologies such as REST, Soap, CMIS or others. This will enable integration with other components and applications involved in the business process. be based on a modular and extensible software architecture from its core. Modularity brings the ability to scale lean. Extensibility is the key to delivering the specicities of each application without rebuilding from scratch each time. Both will result not only in fullling the initial requirements successfully, but also in better controlled, affordable applications that are easier to maintain and evolve. Other must have are: a standard development language and platform (such as Java), efcient and accessible development tools, effective testing and deployment strategies ...

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Supporting More Than Just the Server Side

One distinction is worth mentioning: a Content Management Platform is more than a content repository. Its mission is not only to store any content type and make it accessible, but also to make it easy for developers using the platform to develop any kind of user interface. Too many content management solutions skip that part. A good platform should help developers efciently develop: Traditional Web Applications with a set of different technologies. For instance using HTML5, Ajax, CSS and JavaScript, Java Server Faces (JSF), Google Web Toolkit (GWT), web templating systems such as Freemarker, etc. Rich Internet Applications, supporting technologies like Adobe Flex for implementing the front-end layers. Mobile Web Applications and rich Mobile Applications (based on SDKs for standard platforms such as Android and iOS). A modern content management platform should not make the choice for the developer, but provide support for as many client side technologies as possible, so the developer is not locked into a single approach!

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Run Anywhere, Including the Cloud

Similar to the openness and choice of a client-side technology, a platform should be agnostic when it comes to the deployment and run strategies of the organizations using it. It must support both On-premise deployment on a standard system infrastructure (for instance, an enterprise grade Java stack such as Tomcat, JBoss or others) Cloud-based deployment, since Cloud computing is no longer a theory, but a reality! However, Cloud based deployment should be further explained. Like the termPlatform, nothing is as easy as adding the buzz word Cloud to marketing collateral. Depending on the use case, organizations may have different strategies when it comes to running in the Cloud: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Platform as a Service (PaaS) or simply Software as a Service (SaaS).

The three of them should be made possible by a modern platform!

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Modern Development Techniques: Agile and in the Cloud

As choosing a Content Management Platform is essentially not a choice for a one-time development project, but part of a mid- or long-term strategy, and a cornerstone of this strategy, a modern platform should embrace todays and tomorrows successful development techniques. This includes: Supporting Agile and iterative development practices (Scrum, Extreme Programming or others). Providing a framework and infrastructure for continuous integration as a whole part of the platform, potentially relying on de-facto standard tools like Hudson/ Jenkins. Supporting automatic testing, continuous and automatic performance testing/ benchmarking and continuous deployments. Using modern, proven tools for managing customized source code in a way that is consistent with the platform, such as Git for source control and Maven for the build process.

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Standards Matter, but Dont Be Blind!

A last area to explore, but one of importance: a modern platform should embrace industry standards. This is often important for integration purposes, but also a guarantee for the sustainability of the projects. Standards offer a long list of benets, however, again here, it is not only about simply supporting standards, but also how the platform will implement them. When choosing a platform, one should not only look at the list of supported standards, but also at how they are implemented, and the constraints they can bring alongside the promised benets! Standards that should be looked at include: Content management standards, such as interoperability standards (CMIS for instance, now emerging as the main interoperability standard between document oriented content management systems). Programming standards, such as REST, SOAP, OSGi and others. Integration standards, such as OAuth, LDAP, and OpenSocial. Emerging standards such as those for semantic technologies and HTML5.

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The Business Case for the Platform Approach

It is certainly not difcult to convince architects and developers to go for a platform approach. In most cases, the software quality and interest for the technology are their main criteria. That is, however, not a sufcient reason for any signicant technology choice, as in the end, technology is here to serve business and organizational goals. The real reason for choosing a modern Content Management Platform is not technical, but about its business value: considering the evolution of Enterprise Content Management as depicted above, a modern Content Management Platform offers signicant benets. While every use case should be looked at in detail, in a general manner, it will: Reduce Total Cost of Ownership of an enterprise-grade content management infrastructure, by supporting all content management requirements in a single solution that organizations can capitalize on Increase Return On Investment, by delivering tailor-made applications and a very competitive time to market Improve overall quality and efciency of IT operations, by enabling high-quality, efcient and controlled development processes with a unied set of standard tools

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The Nuxeo Platform, a Modern Content Management Platform

Nuxeo, a leading Open Source ECM vendor, has taken a platform-centric approach for the design of its software. The Nuxeo (Enterprise) Platform is a modern, but already mature technology that fullls most of the requirements explored in this paper and provides the associated benets to any organization developing content-centric business applications. The Nuxeo Platform is a perfect foundation to build and run a wide range of content management applications, including: Document Management, Case Management, Records Management, Digital Asset Management Specic use cases for any Business Content Application,

and all this on a single, well architected platform designed with developers in mind!

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Conclusions? Want to Find Out More?

This executive summary introduces the main topics covered by the paper entitled Content Management Platforms: the Next Generation of Enterprise Content Management. While this clearly highlights some obvious reasons and benets for a modern content management platform, we recommend: 1. Reading the full paper, available at http://www.nuxeo.com/en/contentplatform-whitepaper 2. Building your own business case, and exploring how a Content Management Platform could contribute to the success of your projects 3. Having a look at the Nuxeo Platform, and involving architects and developers, to see how it implements the vision of a modern content management platform.

This whitepaper is an executive summary of the full ebook

Visit www.nuxeo.com/whitepaper to get the full paper

Available for download as a PDF or for ebook readers.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. www.nuxeo.com

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 Western Europe (Paris).

More information is available at http://www.nuxeo.com. Or contact us: contact@nuxeo.com

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