Content Management Federation

Year after year, companies deploy more content silos to the many they already have. Whether it’s as simple as company growth, or departmental choices for better Content Management Systems, or the result of mergers and acquisitons – the application landscape never stops growing and fragmenting. The challenge in managing this is to reach across all the disparity and keep information flowing despite the barriers.

EntropySoft Content Management Federation unifies scattered content silos for better interoperability, improved information access and better information system performance by:

- Delivering a single point of access for content silos

- Acting as an intelligent document router offering consumers and producers of information one-stop content management services

- Drastically reducing the time, complexity and cost of integrating with LoB applications through advanced federated search

- Enabling quick development of apps against any ECM system so developers can focus on adding functionality rather than writing integration logic

- Providing faster time to project value, reduced cost and risk

  
 

The Single Point of Access Dream

Line of business applications (LoB) rely increasingly on Content Management Systems. Whether the LoB applications store the flow of documents they generate like an HR Management System, or consume information as with case management, it is both critical and complex to connect the applications and the content silos. The sheer number of LoB applications and silos to connect can result in an inextricable connectivity nightmare. The upgrades and updates for all the connected repositories make the connectivity nightmare a reccuring one at that, which also involves recurring costs. Mergers and acquisitions add yet more complexity, and the nightmare continues.

 

Content Hub as a single point of access is the solution that makes the dream a reality. With more than 40 Connectors under the hood, Content Hub reorganizes the landscape and puts connectivity control in one place to make information access easy. The Content Hub platform is an abstraction layer that shields LoB applications and users from the diversity of Content Management Systems. It offers a wide range of API’s to connect the LoB applications, and it takes only minutes to mount or unmount content repositories.

 

Quite simply, Content Hub can make any information system more flexible and adaptable over time. For example, it acts as an intelligent document router offering consumers and producers of information one stop shopping Content Management Services. Plus, LoB applications are no longer impacted by ECM upgrades and updates, and even application decommissioning becomes transparent. 

   
 

Federated Search

Search is the primary way to access information today. The digital explosion makes this point an increasingly important one – especially since every content management platform comes with a different search engine, and each with its own search API. The magnitude of search API’s creates difficult interactions between LoB applications and content silos. And this difficulty quickly becomes a barrier when a LoB application needs to interact with multiple content silos.

 

Because EntropySoft implements a single, unique search API across all content silos, it protects the LoB apps from the chaos. The API is an intuitive and easy to integrate SQL-like query language that anyone with a basic understanding SQL statements and queries can use. Here’s how it works. The Content Connectors normalize each source system search API, and Content Hub then acts as a search broker. When a LoB application searches for a document, the query is transmitted to all connected repositories and Content Hub returns the results as one single and consistent result set. For example, an application searching for all content related to a particular customer, may execute the following query: SELECT * WHERE customer=’A’.  In this case, the application receives all documents from the imaging, reporting, and document management systems for a particular customer.  This provides a ‘single view of the customer’ to the calling application.  Since Content Hub does not index data, the search is conducted in real-time, so accurate results are guaranteed.  

 

Content Hub Federated Search is a huge benefit for any organization that deals with many content silos because it drastically reduces the time, complexity and cost of integrating with LoB applications.