What is ECM!!

This presentation is by AIIM which demonstrates what ECM is all about.

in slide 5, the presentation mentions that ECM is not necessarily a single system, but a set of systems that are integrated and working together, to give the complete ECM feeling!

And here is one of the biggest differentiators of Oracle's UCM products!

Oracle UCM provides the complete ECM stack of solutions, including Document Management (DM), Web Content Management (WCM), Digital Assets Management (DAM), Records Management (RM), and all other supporting services such as the Workflow and Business Processes and Content Collaboration.

Imagine the following with me:
we have a website, that consists of several pages, one of the pages has a nice logo in the upper left, and an image of the building on the side, with an article in the middle of the page...
if we dissect this page we will find that the page itself is a content that organizes how other contents appears on the browser using the WCM module, and the image of the building is actually a 10MP image that was inserted into the DAM module, and automatically was converted to a smaller web friendly size and format. While the article in the middle of the page is a word document that was created by the secretary on her desktop, and she dragged it and dropped it into a folder on her desktop using the DM module, which automatically converted it into html, and published it into the web page after the legal department approval!

So, as we see, all modules work perfectly together to provide a final consistent web page within the website, and each module contributes with its services to give the full ECM solution.

In this case, having a separate system for each module means each system will store its data, and it will be redundant across the other systems that use it. This also means that there should be some integration between those systems to finally provide the web page that we talked about.

For oracle, it is one system that manages everything! base content services are shared by all modules that are built on the same code base, means any module can use the services of the other modules natively, thus the process of creation and rendering the web page we mentioned is basically an interaction between the services of only one system, that provides all those services together.

users will have the same experience, since they are using one interface that has all those functionalities, and administrators has only one administrative view of all the ECM functionalities, even the upgrades of the entire ECM stack is basically rolling one patch that upgrades everything together!

I felt that very quickly when I installed the UCM system the first time, and I was really amazed how great were the guys who designed the UCM system to be such piece of art!.

Here is a whitepaper that will explain more why a unified approach is better for you!

Now I will leave you with AIIM's presentation.

What Is ECM?

Oracle Enterprise 2.0 Virtual Conference!

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hear from our experts in EMEA!

the event page, agenda, and registration
http://events.unisfair.com/index.jsp?eid=353&seid=26

waiting to see you all!

Oracle Sites goes Live with WCM!!

Oracle is now moving it's Oracle.com sites from Oracle Portal to Oracle Web Content Management (WCM), which is part of Oracle's Universal Content Managment (UCM) Platform.


here's the announcement on 26-5-2008:



"

First Oracle.com Site Built on UCM Platform Goes Live

Oracle's CRM OnDemand website has been migrated from Oracle Portal to Oracle WCM. This eight month endeavour was the first pilot project for the migration of Oracle.com to the Oracle UCM Platform; other sites, including the Oracle Partner Network and the Oracle Technology Network will follow. The CRM OnDemand site is running externally (outside the firewall) for customers, and is accessible in different languages. Visit CRM OnDemand

"


This will help a lot in managing the huge amount of internal and external sites, and those sites has a huge amount of pages, documents, contributions, and a lot of other contents.

I was thinking a while ago about this move, as it is much more reasonable to present Oracle as one of the WCM references :)
and it will definatly be one of the biggest WCM references.

Well Done ECM Team, we're waiting the full migration announcement...

ECM, BI, and Enterprise Applications!

I've been thinking lately about my ECM product and how to benefit from other technologies in Oracle's middleware, specifically BI.

I found a very comprehensive and interesting article here about the BI, ECM and Apps written by Billy Cripe & Nick Tuson...

BI has always been there for structured data, that resides in databases and structured systems, helping organizations to visualize what is happening in their environments, and suggesting how best to deal with that. Mostly, BI was targeting enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM, but in the real case, a huge amount of data is still unmanaged, which resides in unstructured data, such as emails, documents, sheets... etc.

those sources where very difficult to include in BI calculations, but since the introduction of ECM systems, the unstructured contents became available in a structured or semi-structured way, where metadata that describes business contents are stored in a database, as well as the full text capabilities available in most of current ECM systems. This created what we call a Content Enabled Vertical Applications (CEVAs).

Another important aspect here is the transactions targeting those business documents, which includes trends of users, types of requested documents, access methods, frequency of access, and other data that are collected and saved within the ECM system, those data are very important to build a complete vision of the organization's environment. Those transactions are directly related to the business and the decisions to be taken.

Let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture in CEVAs environments, enterprise applications stores direct business records, and ECM systems stores content files related to those records, along with the descriptive metadata, fulltext, and the transactions related to the contents.

To analyze this heterogeneous data, a BI Engine is the choice to provide a comprehensive picture of the business and an effective BI driven decisions.

Oracle Universal Content Management

Oracle UCM can be easily used for this scenario, where all the metadata, and the full text is directly accessible through the database, and the content tracker component does a great job in collecting all transaction related data from the webserver filters and logs, the content server filters and logs and other sources, apply some cleansing on the data, and provide them in special tables to be accessed by Content Tracker Reports, and other reporting tools, and obviously, BI systems.

To make things more interesting, Oracle UCM has a component called Content Categorizer, that is a rule based auto categorization engine, which can fill metadata fields based on some text based rules, for example, assigning a content type according to the repeated occurrence of some keywords, or accessing the metadata in the actual file’s headers.

Those data can greatly help in the classifications of those contents, and give much more meaningful data to the BI engine.

Example of sales analysis

Let’s take an example of a CRM system that is used by a software company, this CRM stores information about customers, and the ECM system is used to store and manage the whitepapers about the sold products, and is also used to build the website that the public, partners, and customers are accessing.

When a whitepaper is viewed, the ECM system stores all related transactions, where the frequency of access to some whitepapers, or type of products can indicate the market trend, and the data in CRM can indicate the type of customers, or verticals interested in this whitepaper.

Enhancing the understanding of the market can help in determining the marketing approach, or even the development direction.

Example of Dynamic ADs..

A great example was discussed in the article about real time decisions, the example assumes that a user googled some search term, and one of the results landed on your WCM based site, where the pages are dynamically built, the system examines the search term used, consults its BI engine, and discovers the topics that are most likely to attract this visitor, and accordingly suggests an ad banner topic to be added, this happens very quickly while the page is being built, and the user sees the page with some AD that attracts him to click on!

The WCM system tracks if the user did click on the AD and notifies the BI system of that, or if the user didn't click on the AD which shows non-interest of the suggested AD. In both cases the feedback goes to the BI system to better tune the selection of the ADs.

In the end

If you are interested in this topic, I highly recommend that you visit the article here, it has much more information, and much more details.