next generation ecm

7/29/2019 Next Generation ECM

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Next-Generation ECM

Connected Users,

Connected Enterprises,

Connected Content

November 2012

John Newton

Founder + CTO
http://www.alfresco.com/


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Is traditional ECM ready or a new enterprise?Enterprise content management (ECM) is in a state o disruption. With the explosion o mobile and cloud technologies,

users are working dierently than ever beore. Enterprises are more diversied than ever, with supply chains extending

across the rewall, across organizations and across continents. What hasnt changed is this: content is still king in the

enterprise. But the types o content, and the places that content needs to travel to enable business processes, have

changed dramatically.

Traditional, legacy ECM platorms like Documentum, FileNet and OpenText are not ready or this new world. Those

technologies were architected in a time when users and content stayed behind the rewall, on servers and PCs. They

may paper-over their aging technology with cloud and mobile acquisitions, but that is more about being able to say

we have that! than oering integrated, next-generation solutions. Even Microsot SharePoint, which does a better job

o addressing ad-hoc collaboration than legacy ECM, lacks an architecture that truly enables mobile and cloud use

cases (and SharePoint still struggles to automate processes and scale).

In this whitepaper, we will take a deeper look at how ECM must change to meet the diverse new needs o todays

enterprise. In act, content management has never been more important. But just as the very nature o an enterprise

is changing undamentally, so must a category (ECM) that has previously dened itsel as meeting the needs o the

whole enterprise.

Users: Are the most connected users also the most

disconnected (rom the enterprise)?

The pressure is increasingly on IT to support a new class o connected, tech-savvy users who are taking more control

over their technology. Users are demanding support or their new tablet and mobile devices, new remote working styles

and new cloud apps that they believe make them more productive. Its hard to argue with the idea o more productive

employees, so BYOD (bring your own device) policies and fexible working arrangements are on the rise.

As many corporate systems have been slow to deliver the native mobile apps and capabilities that users desire, usersare oten turning to consumer-born web applications to meet their personal productivity needs. There is little doubt that

a good deal o enterprise content is on Dropbox today put there by users otherwise rustrated by the lack o mobile or

B2B sharing capabilities in their enterprise content repository (or shared drives). Theres also little doubt that the enterprise,

or the most part, is worried about the Dropbox problem. IT, legal, security and risk ocers are concerned that they dont

know where their corporate IP is, much less how to get it back when users leave the organization.

Which brings up a question: Is it possible that these new connected workers who are working anywhere, at any

time, on any device are actually the most disconnected workers rom the rest o the enterprise? To answer this

question, lets remind ourselves what the organizational needs are or managing content and deploying document

management and ECM:

Automate formerly paper-based processes

Improve operational efciency via automation and version control

Ensure consistency and integrity of outbound content and communication

Enable data integrity, records management and compliance

Maintain control of company intellectual property (IP)

Collaborate securely with colleagues, to gain more organizational productivity
http://www.alfresco.com/http://www.alfresco.com/


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The needs or enterprise content management havent changed: make the enterprise, as a whole, more productive,

ecient, secure and compliant. But the new challenge o ECM is to do this in an environment where quite possibly the

most productive, motivated and valuable contributors to the enterprise are outside the rewall, using new devices and

apps, and pushing the envelope o IT.

You arent going to change the users. You must change your approach to ECM.

The enterprise: More connected and more extended

Just as users are dierent today, so is the enterprise. It can be argued that the working denition o an enterprise,

when looking at enterprise sotware categories, such as ECM or ERP, was that an enterprise was dened by its rewall.

Everyone and everything inside the rewall was a controlled part o the enterprise, while everything outside the rewall

was to be repelled.

Interestingly, Merriam-Websters denition o enterprise is actually a pretty good description o todays reality: a unit o

economic organization or activity, especially a business organization. The denition says nothing o rewalls, and indeed

only implies a loose organization based on common economic activity not necessarily an individual company. The

modern enterprise is oten an interconnected web o companies, contractors, ree-agents, partners, suppliers, employees

and customers, oten dened more by a business process or a brand than by the bounds o a rewall.

While Apple is oten li ted up today as an example o whole-product thinking and usability (rightly so), they are also a

prototypical example o a modern, extended enterprise. Its supply chain is made up o independent suppliers all across

the globe, unied solely by delivering a brand experience that is second to none. Interestingly, Apple is also regarded

as one o the most secure even secretive companies in the world, maniacally concerned about the security and

condentiality o its IP, launch plans and product roadmap. Apple is at once a completely extended enterprise, yet it

still requires the control and security that have typically been only available behind the rewall.

So i the modern enterprise cannot be dened by a rewall, then a modern approach to ECM must not be bound by the

limits o an IT inrastructure. Content, business processes and collaboration must be ree to travel anywhere it needs

to, to get the job done eciently, but in a manner where it can still be harnessed and controlled to meet the needs o the

enterprise (productivity, eciency, security, compliance, etc.).

In short, a new, more expansive view o the enterprise requires a new approach to ECMan approach that recognizes

that modern enterprises are not bound by the rewall.

Content: More types, more social, more contextyet still the same

I users are dierent and enterprises are dierent, then surely enterprise content must be dierent, too. Wellyes and

no. Microsot PowerPoint, Excel and Word ormats (along with CAD/CAM, Adobe Creative Suite les & PDF) are still the

de-acto standards o knowledge workers everywhere. These les and ormats must be managed and dealt with as abaseline requirement.

Whats dierent, however, is the social content that now needs to be categorized as enterprise also. That photograph

o your competitors shel display that your business partner emailed you (along with the resulting comment thread)?

That video o the equipment malunction at the remote job site that your oreman sent to the repair team (along with

the geo-location data)? That Google Doc that your supplier shared with you or collaboration? This is todays enterprise

content, driven by mobile devices, consumer social network behavior and the act that photos, videos and

comment threads help companies get real work done aster.


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What is unique about this social content is that, more than ever beore, it is driving people to truly understand and utilize

the context o the content who posted it, at what time, in what circumstances and their opinion o the content is

now central to that contents value. In the early days o ECM, context around content had a name: metadata. Metadata

is contextual inormation that is attached to content, and can be stored in the ECM system (author, created date, le

type, etc.), and possibly even customized or business processes (customer name, invoice number, contract date, etc.).

You can run actions and workfows against metadata, in order to help content move to the right person or system at

the right time.

Today, when you add opinion and preerence metadata (such as who likes a certain document, or what people are

saying about the content), and make it no-brainer easy to attach sophisticated metadata (such as geo-location, which

most smartphones attach to photos by deault), then you have a whole new richness to enterprise content that can launch

totally new business processes and provide previously unattainable levels o insight. This is content (and context) that

actually drives action, speeds delivery and enhances collaboration. It is also the uel or ad-hoc business processes and

collaborations just like photos are the uel or rich relationships on Facebook.

So, i your ECM strategy isnt contemplating both social content and traditional content, you need to consider a new

approach to ECM.

And one more thing: The new IT inrastructure

So ar, we have asserted that traditional, legacy approaches to ECM are not sucient, because they dont address new

user behaviors, a more extended enterprise and social content. But even i they did address those important business

actors, traditional ECM vendors are ailing at addressing the new realities o the IT inrastructure.

Its no secret that the cloud is here to stay and is undamentally changing the technology landscape. And, like any

technology trend, the let-behind legacy providers, who are trapped in sotware architectures made or a dierent time,

are announcing cloud strategies and point-product acquisitions to buy themselves time to rebuild their platorms rom

the ground up. The act is: legacy ECM platorms are generally not built or cloud scale, because they lack multi-tenancy

and horizontal scalability to support a distributed enterprise.

ECM technology built or the new enterprise needs to span rom traditional on-premise deployments, to virtualized

private cloud deployments to ull-fedged public-cloud SaaS deployments and everything in between. Specically,

ECM technology needs to be easily deployed on traditional servers, in virtualized environments (such as VMware or

open-source hypervisors), in private clouds, and even as a pure SaaS cloud service or, in some cases, utilizing

multiple inrastructures, all at the same time.

It needs to contemplate both traditional ECM use cases (i.e., document management, records management, workfow,

collaboration) and the new, cloud and mobile use cases made popular by consumer-born cloud applications and mobile

devices (i.e., simple le sharing, mobile content access, sync). And it needs to keep everything, and everyone, secure

and in sync no matter where uses or content resides.

You should be in charge o your content strategy and your cloud strategy, and your ECM provider should enable you to

implement your strategy on your timeline, with your unique requirements or security, integration, customization and scale.

In general, your ECM technology provider should allow you to deliver a scalable content-as-a-service to your enterprise,

on your terms. Sound impossible? Its not. Alresco is delivering it today.


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A new era o ECM: It starts with open

These challenges to ECM, as a category, are not insurmountable. In act, when we started Alresco in 2005, we set out

to create a new architecture or ECM that would allow or dramatic, unoreseen changes to the nature o enterprise

computing. In short, we built Alresco or a time such as this.

As a team o ECM veterans, we recognized that the uture was not going to be predictable, so a new approach would be

required. Any new approach would have to be uture-proo. The changes to enterprise IT were already moving too ast to

predict and the power o the incumbent, legacy vendors was not going to allow us to compete on eatures alone.

The value o being open

Like Red Hat, JBoss & MySQL beore us, the choice we made was to create an architecture that was open. Not open

or the sake o open, but open or the purpose o guaranteeing that our technology could scale to meet the unknowable

uture needs o the enterprise. Open, or Alresco, meant developing technology out in the open so that a community

could help us, see what was coming next (open source), and build powerul solutions or specic business use cases.

More importantly, it meant driving and adopting open standards, so Alresco would be able to interoperate with both

legacy technologies and whatever new technologies came out next so that customers had choice and fexibility in howthey could benet rom Alresco. This open approach earned us thousands o enterprise customers, hundreds o

partners, and millions o users globally. It has also made Alresco the largest open-source content management

company in the world.

But or our customers, partners and users, the choice o an open architecture has created something that is much

more valuable today than we ever imagined: a robust open content platorm that can be the content backbone or

todays modern enterprise (as well as tomorrows).

In the next section, we will address the challenges one-by-one, and demonstrate how Alresco is the standard-bearer

o a new era o ECM.

Alresco delivers hybrid ECM today with Alresco One

At a recent Gartner conerence, ECM pundits talked about how the uture o ECM is about hybrid content architectures,

where the systems o engagement (where users collaborate with colleagues and create drats and work-in-progress) are

oten separated rom systems o record (where nal content is held or business continuity, legal or regulatory purposes).

The content chaos that ensues in these mixed environments will be solved with a hybrid approach to ECM and Gartner

validates that most companies will be looking at this in 2014 and beyond.

But why wait until 2014? As a recognized visionary and innovator in ECM, Alresco now has all o the core technology to

deliver a true hybrid ECM solution that allows document management, collaboration and workfow to cross the rewall

and service the entire extended enterprise. We call this complete enterprise solution Alresco One.


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The Alresco One solution includes:

Alfresco Enterprise on-premise: the proven, high-performance, scalable ECM platform that is in production at over

3,000 enterprises across the globe, and enables:

Document management

Business process automation & workfow

Records management

Case management

Imaging, scanning and archiving

Large scale collaboration

Web content publishing

Integration with SAP, PeopleSot and other enterprise systems through a host o open interaces and APIs

An Alfresco in the cloud Enterprise Network: a true, multi-tenant version of Alfresco running in Alfrescos public cloud.

Used by over 40,000 organizations globally, Alresco in the cloud provides:

Simple document management

Cloud collaboration or secure B2B extranets

File sharing

Desktop and mobile sync

Alresco identity service that allows collaboration with external users, with ull IT control

Integration with Salesorce.com, Google Docs and other cloud services through an open API

Alfresco Mobile: native iOS and Android apps, built for productivity, including:

Secure document access and mobile sync

Upload with support or metadata

Activity eeds

Task management

Note taking Open-source code or rapid customization

iOS and Android SDKs or custom app development

Alfresco Enterprise Sync: native sync technology built into Alfresco Enterprise on-premise and Alfresco in the cloud,

which allows:

Controlled sync o les or olders rom Alresco Enterprise on-premise to Alresco in the cloud

Full delity o metadata and version control history

Un-sync capability, to ensure that Alresco Enterprise remains the system o record behind the rewall

In summary, Alresco One is the rst ECM solution in the world to provide all o the capabilities that todays enterprise

requires to support and manage the entire liecycle o enterprise content on any mobile device, inside or outside the

rewall, and to both internal and external users.

But the question is: how does Alresco One stand up to the challenges o ECM today, as we outlined in the rst part o this

whitepaper? Lets address those one by one.


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Alresco One: How does it stack up to todays challenges?

In the frst section o this whitepaper, we looked at todays users. Users o

enterprise content management systems are:

Using new mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets

Increasingly working outside of connes of the ofce

Experimenting with consumer-born cloud tools to make themselves more productive (and thus demanding new use

cases and ease o use)

The challenge? How can we keep these users connected to business processes and continue to make the enterprise as

a whole more ecient and secure, while still enabling them to maximize their personal productivity?

Answer:Todays document management and ECM platorms must enable productivity on any device, integrate with the

content tools o choice or users, work inside or outside the rewall, and deliver consumer services use cases that users

expect today as well as the traditional ECM use cases.

Alresco One delivers on all ronts. With Alresco Mobile or iOS or Android, users get a native document management

and workfow experience on their avorite devices both smartphone and tablet. Alresco Mobiles open-source code

makes the apps easy to customize or specic business requirements, and Alrescos SDKs or iOS and Android allow

Alresco unctionality to be embedded directly into custom-built mobile apps. On traditional Windows and Mac desktops,

Alresco has best-in-class integration with Microsot Oce and Google Docs, allowing users to edit and save content while

version control and le-locking happens in the background.

Alresco in the cloud allows you to extend collaboration out to agencies, partners and contractors, without

letting them into your secure network. When you initiate collaboration in the cloud, external users are invited only into

content that you authorize, and their access can be turned o at any time. Alresco in the cloud is a true web app that

enables everything rom secure le sharing to desktop and mobile sync to ull collaboration on content all in a secure,

company-controlled environment.

Second, we looked at the modern enterprise, which is:

More extended than ever before, with an interconnected web of employees, partners, suppliers, constituents,

customers & ree-agents

Not dened by the bounds of the rewall anymore

Still concerned about security, compliance, efciency and protecting its corporate IP

The challenge? How can we enable an extended enterprise, where business processes and content dont stop at the

rewall anymore, yet security and control are still required?

Answer: ECM must allow content, metadata and business processes to span rom behind the rewall out to the

extended enterprise, outside o the traditional IT inrastructure. ECM must still allow the enterprise to control its content

and processes, but be fexible to extend those controls to users who are not directly controlled by the IT department.


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At its very core, an ECM solution must make an enterprise itsel more efcient, more compliant and more

productive. Consumer-born cloud applications that have relied on user adoption to drive a wedge into the IT department

may be compelling or individual users and even ad-hoc collaboration, but do they really help the enterprise as a whole?

Alresco One views the cloud as a necessary extension o the ECM system o record. Sure, users can use

Alresco in the cloud as a standalone service (and many do). But the true power o Alresco One is demonstrated with

Alresco Enterprise Sync where users can sync les and olders rom Alresco Enterprise on-premise to Alresco in

the cloud or the purpose o B2B collaboration.

Importantly, the content, the metadata and version history all stay in sync between Alresco Enterprise

on-premise and Alresco in the cloud and users and IT can shut down the sync at any time. And with

Alrescos powerul and customizable rules and workfow, Enterprise Sync can be protected with approval steps or

even restricted, based on types o documents or particular users. For the rst time, enterprise content is ree to go

where it needs to go and to whomever needs to use it but still controlled by the enterprise.

Third, we looked at how the nature o enterprise content is:

Still largely dependent on traditional Microsoft, Adobe and other desktop le formats

Increasingly characterized by richer, more contextual, social content, with new formats, new types of metadata and

new content creation tools (rom mobile and web apps)

The challenge? How can we integrate social content into our ECM strategy, so that we can still automate processes

and make the enterprise more ecient, without losing control?

Answer: ECM must be able to handle social content and content rom mobile devices, enrich ALL content with social

context (such as likes and comments), and even be able to publish out content to social networks, so that it can be

shared more broadly. ECM must also be able to handle new rich media in ways that are appropriate to the medium,

with richer views and appropriate actions.

Alresco One includes the ull power o the proven Alresco platorm, which natively handles all types o

documents and fles. Social eatures, such as liking the most popular content, activity streams and commenting are

built-in, enriching content collaboration all the way to mobile devices. Social publishing allows customers to use Alresco

to publish straight to popular social networks, with an audit trail o when content was published by whom. And Alrescos

class-leading support or mobile metadata means that location data and tags can be captured rom photos and videos

on mobile devices, in order to start new types o workfows or collaboration.

And fnally, we looked at the new IT inrastructure, which is:

Increasingly virtualized

Aware of and often integrated with the cloud

Able to support users no matter where they are, and what tools they choose to use

The challenge? How can we keep everything and everyone in sync and secure, even throughout the extended enterprise?

Answer: ECM must be able to be deployed on traditional IT hardware behind the rewall, in private clouds, or even spun-up

in seconds in the public cloud. And, everything must be able to stay in sync, no matter how an enterprise chooses to deploy.


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Alresco Ones modern, lightweight architecture, when combined with Enterprise Sync and Alresco in

the cloud, provide almost limitless options or deployment. Depending on your security needs, customization

requirements and cloud strategy, you can use Alresco ull behind the rewall (ully supported by Alresco Mobile),

entirely in Alrescos public cloud, or anywhere in between. Alresco can be deployed in virtualized containers, and is

even optimized or deployment in Amazon AWS, making ull use o EC2, RDB & S3 or storage. With Enterprise Sync,

you can enable your users to begin using Alresco in the cloud or document management and collaboration, even while

you are customizing Alresco and integrating it into your internal enterprise systems. When that integration is complete,

users are already used to Alresco and true business process automation can begin. Alresco One has the astest

time-to-value o any ECM solution on the market.

So, what are you going to do next?

The challenge o managing enterprise content and enabling collaboration has never been more complex. With more

connected users, a more extended enterprise, the new diversity o enterprise content and increasingly virtualized IT

inrastructures, legacy ECM vendors and traditional approaches will not be able to keep up.

We started Alresco in 2005 with a vision to build a new ECM architecture with a new, more open approach. Today,

the Alresco One solution, with the perect combination o on-premise, cloud and mobile capabilities, is truly thestandard-bearer o the hybrid uture o ECM.

We invite you to experience Alresco One or yoursel at Alresco.com. Try Alresco in the cloud and Alresco mobile

today or ree, or download an Alresco Enterprise trial to see how Alresco ts into your IT inrastructure. Most importantly,

see how other companies are saving money, becoming more productive and responsive and driving eciencies with

Alresco at alresco.com/customers.
http://www.alfresco.com/http://www.alfresco.com/customershttp://www.alfresco.com/customershttp://www.alfresco.com/customershttp://www.alfresco.com/customershttp://www.alfresco.com/customershttp://www.alfresco.com/customershttp://www.alfresco.com/customershttp://www.alfresco.com/customershttp://www.alfresco.com/customershttp://www.alfresco.com/customershttp://www.alfresco.com/


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Learn more at alresco.com

Alresco UK+44 (0)1628 876 500 |Alresco Americas +1-888-317-3395

Contact

Global Headquarters

+44 (0)1628 876 500

Alresco Sotware, Ltd.

The Place

Bridge Ave

Maidenhead

SL6 1AF

United Kingdom

Americas Headquarters

+1-888-317-3395

Alresco Sotware, Inc.

Ste 720

2839 Paces Ferry Rd SE

Atlanta, GA 30339

United States

Asia-Pacifc Headquarters

+61 2 8875 7835

Alresco Sotware, Ltd.

Level 9

Avaya House

123 Epping Rd

North Ryde New South Wales 2113

Australia

About AlrescoAlresco is how great businesses share, organize and protect their content. Nearly 7 million people in over

180 countries use Alresco Enterprise, Cloud, Mobile and Community to manage over 3 billion pieces o content

worldwide. Whether on the go or in the oce, Alresco empowers todays teams to do great work. And, with one in

eight Alresco customers operating in the nancial services sector, there are compelling reasons why these customers

are choosing the reedom o open source with Alresco:

Lower risk Alresco oers a single repository or all electronic documents, workfow portolios and other

unstructured content reducing inormation silos and redundant data. Unied management o all electronic les

reduces maintenance, leverages a single content standard, and removes end user complexity and

versioning errors.

Compliance The Alresco Platorm simplies record keeping, and its automated document retention and

destruction models enable regulatory compliance created by the Dodd-Frank Act and BASEL III. Alresco also

provides ully automated routines that convert documents rom proprietary ormats into long-term archival ormats

such as PDF/A and ODF.

Open standards Alresco easily interoperates with existing ront-end applications, desktop sotware and enterprise

inrastructure. Through the use o protocols such as CMIS, CIFS, WebDAV, RESTul APIs and Soap, its open approachmakes innovation and adoption easy and minimizes expensive recoding.

Business process Alresco can leverage existing organizational workfows, and provides award-winning BPM

capabilities that can reduce an institutions decision cycle times and increase productivity.

Cost efciency With no upront license ee, Alrescos subscription-based model covers all upgrades and

maintenance and, because it is based on the number o servers rather than concurrent users, it is easier and

more cost eective to scale. Alresco is also virtualization and cloud-riendly, and enables secure mobile access

and collaboration or cloud-based content.

Agility and exibility Alresco enables applications to be quickly built, deployed and modied as needs change,

and, by avoiding vendor lock-in, oers reedom o choice and the opportunity to leverage existing technologieswith the platorm to deliver a complete ECM solution.

To fnd out more about the uses and benefts o Alresco

or fnancial services applications, please visit:

alresco.com/customers
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