ECM Platforms: the Next Generation of Enterprise Content Management

ECM Platforms: The Next Generation of Enterprise Content Management

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

Over the last decade, content technology, use and expectations have signi cantly evolved - rede ning the requirements for architects, project managers and developers responsible for implementing ECM solutions. Emerging best practices suggest that a well-designed ECM platform supports solution development and deployment in a manner that is predictable, sustainable and aordable.

This white paper explores these content technology changes, and explains the value and bene ts to business and technical adopters of embracing a new generation of ECM platform technology.

Eric Barroca, Roland Benedetti - August 12, 2011

Contents Executive Summary______4 Scope and Goals______4 Target Audience______4 Defining Enterprise Content and Enterprise Content Management______5 What Is Enterprise Content Management?______5 What Is Enterprise Content?______6 Drivers for ECM Adoption______6 Enterprise Content Trends______8 ECM: It's not Just File Shares as Content Tools______8 The Evolution of ECM______9 Content Diversity______10 Smart Content______11 Big Data Is Big Content______12 Requirements and Challenges for a Modern Content Platform______15 Enabling Content-Driven Processes and Applications______15 Providing Modularity and Extensibility______17 Supporting More Than Just the Server Side______19 Running Anywhere, Including the Cloud______20 Modern Development: Agile and Soon in the Cloud______23 Standards Matter, but Don't Be Blind______26 Why Standards?______26 Existing and Emerging Standards______26 The Business Case for Adopting a Platform Approach to Content Applications__33 Qualitative Reasons______33 Calculating ROI______34 Nuxeo's Enterprise Platform: a Modern ECM Platform ______37 Conclusion______39 What You Can Expect When Adopting ECM______39 Table of Figures Figure 1: Drivers for ECM Adoption (Miles, 2011)...... 7 Figure 2: Reasons for Adopting New ECM (Miles, 2011)...... 7 Figure 3: Traditional ECM functions...... 9 Figure 4: The Evolution of Content Management (Miles, 2011)...... 10 Figure 5: How well is content managed (Miles, 2011)...... 11 Figure 6: The Evolution of Content...... 12 Figure 7: Organizational Unit Content Growth (Chute, Manfrediz, Minton, Reinsel, Schlichting, & Toncheva, 2008)...... 13 Figure 8: Architecture Pattern for Content Driven Applications...... 16

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Figure 9: Reasons for Inability to Meet ECM Vision...... 17 Figure 10: Multi-Channel Content Delivery...... 20 Figure 11: Cloud Computing Taxonomy...... 22 Figure 12: Development as a Service...... 25 Figure 13: Linked Open Data...... 30 Figure 14: Benefit and Cost Categories...... 34 Figure 15: Nuxeo Architecture...... 37 Figure 16: Customizing the Nuxeo Platform...... 38 Table of Tables Table 1: Example ROI Calculation...... 36

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Executive Summary

Scope and Goals

This document is intended for technology leaders and infuencers who are in- volved 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 fexible 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 infuences 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 specific enterprise content management process, application, framework or platform.

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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 technology used 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

• workfow 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 fexibility.

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

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organizations to gain control over their content to accomplish organizational ob- jectives.

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 nar- rowly-defined set of records. Enterprise content may 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 en- tity 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 ac- curately 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.

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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: Reasons for Adopting New ECM (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 a solid technology platform.

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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 workfow 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 con- form 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 workfow to support content-centric business processes. Without the ability to classify the

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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 more diverse 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

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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, fexible 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 fexible 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.

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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 scanned images 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.

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Early Document ●File Only – file Management system based

Enterprise Content ●Binary Files + Management limited Dublin Previous gen. Core

●Content Structure Next Generation of Next Generation of + complex Enterprise Content Enterprise Content metadata + binary Management Management file attachment 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 (Ma- nyika, 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).

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 enter-

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Figure 7: Organizational Unit Content Growth (Chute, Manfrediz, Minton, Reinsel, Schlichting, & Toncheva, 2008) prise 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 ex- actly 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 workfow 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 to automate decisions previously made by humans, re-

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ducing operational costs. Even if companies don’t automate decisions com- pletely, 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 to manage, 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 over- whelming. 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 trans- forming the entire ECM space.

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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 in executing the new hire process. This is a content centric process. A re- sume, 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.

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 below illustrates one possible architectural model for organizing content-driven applications using content platform components.

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Figure 8: Architecture Pattern for Content Driven Applications

In this model, the ECM platform exposes services such as workfow, authentication and access control 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 fexible 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.

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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 fexible 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.

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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 “hack- ing,” 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 should enable 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.

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• 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 sta- ging 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.

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• 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 ser- vlet engine, JBoss application servers or other standard infrastructure without re- questing 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 many organizations. 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.

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Cloud-based platforms allow architects to design sophisticated, reliable, and highly available enterprise content solutions without concern for:

• Installation dependencies • Software configurations

• Computing storage capacities • Hardware investments

• Upgrade paths • 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 in this 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:

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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 (Reid & Kisker, 2011), 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 seam- lessly 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 cloud hosting impractical.

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• 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 im- plies:

• 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 ex- amined 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.

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• 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 chal- lenging 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 re- motely. 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 exper- ience growth.

Development in the cloud has many of the same benefits as other cloud-based of- ferings, such as lower acquisition cost, faster adoption, simpler setup and config- uration 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 • Continuous Integration

• Compilation • Automated Development Testing

• Source control • 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 legacy architectures.

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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.

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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 ECM space 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 • Ability to create composite inter- costs faces that are tailored to the needs

• Increased development consistency, of specific job roles – mashability simplicity and predictability • Improved application portability

• Improved code reuse • Enable faster time to market be-

• Reduced cost, time and effort to cause it is easier to purchase off transition between vendors and the shelf components and applica- solutions tions that can integrate and provide

• Reduced focus on commodity and features for the solution infrastructure 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 uni- versal definition of what is most valuable; it always varies by the unique technical and business needs of the organization.

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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 tar- geted 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. Offi- cially 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, Re- trieve, 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 imple-

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mentations, 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 ad- apters have been created for other languages, defined under the Java Com- munity 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 an ECM 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 fexibility 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 Ex- tensible Markup Language (XML) is a standard managed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The human and machine-readable text-based markup lan-

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guage, 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 transforma- tion, 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 inter- ested 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 fexible technology platform for semantically enhanced content management. IKS has resulted in several Open Source projects, such as the Apache Stan- bol 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 Se- mantic Web technology. The use of a modular ECM platform will no doubt make this easier!

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Figure 13: Linked Open Data

Other Non-Content Related Standards That Matter

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

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solution between applications, and they can access any piece of information in the 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 tar- geted 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 for developers 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 re- strict 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, OAuth supports 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 organizations that 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.

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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 re- sponses 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 em- braced 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.

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The Business Case for Adopting a Platform Approach to Content Applications

Most 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 requis- ite 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.

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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 in- volves 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 classi- fied 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.

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• 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 Project B: Customer Project C: MarCom Document Return Processing Dept Digital Asset Management Management Specific ap- With Specific ap- Lever- Specific Lever- proach, Content proach, devel- aging the approach, aging the buying soft- Platform oping the ap- Content buying an Content ware from a approach plication from Platform out-of-the- Platform DM provider scratch, using used for box DAM used for a development project A solution project A framework CAPEX Consulting 65,000 65,000 80,000 60,000 5,000 5,000 (advisory, customization and integration) Internal 34,000 34,000 12,000 24,000 5,000 5,000 (process definition, training, project management) Software acquisi- 45,000 0 3,000 0 60,000 0 tion Infrastructure 15,000 15,000 15,000 2,000 14,000 0 setup TOTAL 159,000 114,000 110,000 86,000 84,000 10,000 OPEX Year 1 17,600 37,600 9,500 6,000 15,000 0

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Ongoing project 24,000 16,000 18,000 15,000 0 0 cost (enhancements, project management) Software main- 10,000 30,000 500 5,000 10,000 0 tenance & support Infrastructure 7,600 7,600 9,000 1,000 5,000 0 Year 2 35,600 49,600 22,500 15,000 15,000 0 Ongoing project 18,000 12,000 13,000 9,000 0 0 cost Software main- 10,000 30,000 500 5,000 10,000 0 tenance & support Infrastructure 7,600 7,600 9,000 1,000 5,000 0 Year 3 45,600 55,600 33,500 23,000 15,000 0 Ongoing project 28,000 18,000 21,000 17,000 0 0 cost Software main- 10,000 30,000 500 5,000 10,000 0 tenance & support Infrastructure 7,600 7,600 12,000 1,000 5,000 0 TCO (on 3 years 257,800 256,800 175,500 130,000 129,000 10,000 only) Specific approach Platform approach TOTAL Cost of Ownership, 562,300 USD 396,800 USD all projects Cost Reduction - 165,500 USD

Table 1: Example ROI Calculation

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 de- crease or are eliminated for subsequent implementations using the ECM platform.

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Nuxeo's Enterprise Platform: a Modern ECM Platform

Open source ECM vendor Nuxeo has taken a platform centric approach to delivering content management capabilities (Fermigier, Delprat, Grisel, Guillaume, 2010.). 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 fexibility 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

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• 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.

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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.

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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.ne t /

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

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

OSGi: http://www.osgi.or g/

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/

Page 40/40 About Nuxeo

Nuxeo delivers an open source document management application built with a complete, modular and extensible open source platform for enterprise content management. Other packaged applications built with the platform provide solutions for digital asset management and case management. Designed by developers for developers, the Nuxeo Enterprise Platform o ers modern technologies, unmatched modularity, a powerful plug-in model and extensive packaging capabilities. Using a fully open source development model, Nuxeo provides a subscription program with software maintenance, technical support and customization tools.

Nuxeo ECM is trusted by 1000+ organizations across 145 countries, including Cengage Learning, Pearson Education, AFP News Agency, EllisDon and Jeppesen, a Boeing Company. Nuxeo is dual-headquartered in North America (Boston) and Western Europe (Paris).

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