Open Source ECM-Innovation and Agility
The proliferation of information has made enterprise content management a necessity for all organizations. The content management landscape itself has evolved over the years as social media, mobile devices and cloud computing has become mainstream, leading the transformation of the Web into an interactive environment for users to collaborate and share information. It's no longer just about managing content, but also enabling workforce collaboration, leveraging the social technologies and creating an engaging user experience that achieves maximum impact. Organizations need to consider each aspect of enterprise content management (ECM)—collaborative document management, Web experience management, enterprise social networking, mobile devices, portals and intranets—and take a more agile approach in forming their content infrastructure and find solutions to the challenges and opportunities presented by the social age.
Adapting to the Evolving Landscape
Social software has become an important aspect of how we conduct business today. Social business can be enabled by social technologies that improve collaboration and customer engagement.
However, social software tends to create large amounts of unmanaged content. What most enterprises struggle with is balancing the need for collaboration and productivity on one hand; and management, control and governance on the other hand. When broken down, there are two categories of content management systems—traditional systems of record (i.e. ECM systems), which promote efficiency, and the new generation of systems of engagement (i.e. social business software), that create effectiveness.
At the center of this lies social content management, where all social content is automatically stored in a content repository for reuse, repurposing, archival and value creation.
Meanwhile, the Web has gone through some tremendous changes over the years and has evolved into a dynamic environment where users are constantly exchanging information and collaborating in real-time. Thus, creating engaging, rich user experiences have become more important than ever. Furthermore, the proliferation of mobile devices has increased the need for accessing fresh content anytime, anywhere. To meet these increasing user expectations, organizations must create and manage an engaging Web experience. Managing Web content alone is no longer sufficient, and the broader category of Web experience management (WEM)—where the entire visitor experience across multiple online channels can be managed and optimized—now predominates.
Moreover, extending WEM to mobile applications creates the need for native-like applications on mobile devices without sacrificing features and performance.
In addition, many organizations are turning to cloud-based deployments of their content solutions for improved operational efficiency and dynamic scalability.
However, no matter how robust and well managed a content-rich solution is, it can't be successful without search. The challenge of enterprise search is providing a solution that can index data and documents from a variety of sources across the organization, including file systems, intranets, document repositories, email and databases.
To create a successful content strategy, all of the above considerations must be thoroughly analyzed to determine the importance each role plays in the organization. From WEM to collaborative document management, intranets, enterprise social networks, mobile applications, cloud deployments and enterprise search, open platforms provide the necessary flexibility to adapt to the evolving market.
The Open Source Advantage
When considering ECM solutions, leading organizations find commercially supported open source solutions attractive for a variety of reasons: They facilitate flexibility and agility; enable enterprises to remain open and not bound to a single vendor; and provide a fundamental cost advantage that proprietary solutions can never match. Open source ensures zero up-front licensing fees, no forced upgrades and no vendor lock-in. Moreover, active participation within the open source community allows development teams to share insights, strategies and knowledge about open source products, capabilities, flaws and features. This level of communication fosters innovation, responsiveness, and, in the end, bottom-line productivity.
When establishing content and collaboration platform goals, a wide range of business drivers must be considered—flexibility, maintainability, user adoption and productivity, and both near- and long-term costs. Open source solutions provide advantages in all those areas. Industry-leading open source software includes the Alfresco content management platform, the Liferay portal platform and the Apache Solr search platform.
By supplementing these core platforms with additional best-of-breed open source technologies, a complete solution can be delivered to effectively address multiple business challenges that ultimately result in bottom-line revenue growth, enhanced customer loyalty and improved internal operations and employee productivity.
For example, one of our solutions using Alfresco now enables a major publishing company to centralize all digital content and rich media across its business units, resulting in streamlined content development, improved search and retrieval and faster Web content production cycles. The same customer has also been able to enhance its Web presence and manage a consistent visitor experience across multiple channels, resulting in expanded revenue opportunities by increasing site traffic and customer engagement.
Similarly, a leading vendor of fitness programs benefits from a solution using Liferay and Solr for implementing a large-scale social community that has allowed them to grow membership to over 1.5 million users and dramatically expand revenue.
Rivet Logic is an award-winning consulting and systems integration firm that helps enterprises better engage with customers, improve collaboration and streamline business operations. Rivet Logic offers a full suite of professional services and solutions focused on industry-leading open source software. With deep expertise in technologies such as Alfresco, Liferay, and Apache Solr, Rivet Logic crafts compelling solutions that power multi-channel Web properties, enterprise collaboration, and social communities. Rivet Logic—Artisans of Open Source. Visit us at rivetlogic.com.