As Published In March/April 2005

Tame Your Content
By David. A. Kelly

How enterprises of all sizes are managing unstructured data

Lansing Community College, in Lansing, Michigan, had a serious content problem. "We had disparate systems that were all in different hodgepodge formats. People had a very hard time getting information, and the information they did get was questioned, because of the different sources we had," explains Glenn Cerny, vice president and CIO at Lansing Community College. "So we had problems with the quality of our data and the fact that the maintenance and the upkeep of all our systems were at a point where we were fire-drilling everything. We had isolated people running the systems, and if they left the college, nobody would know how to run those systems."

Cerny knew that the college needed to act quickly to create a comprehensive content management system, but because, like many other organizations, it faced an environment of limited financial resources (Lansing's state funding has decreased almost US$8 million over the past few years), he needed to ensure that he was using resources as efficiently as possible.

Starting in January 2002, Lansing redesigned its whole infrastructure around Oracle databases; Oracle Collaboration Suite, including Oracle Files; Oracle applications, including fully implemented HR and Financials systems; Oracle Tutor, for documenting procedures; and an enhanced and robust portal. Cerny combined servers into a centralized data center with HP servers, an XP 512 SAN, and some blade servers. The creation of the system turned out to be successful on two fronts: Not only did the college get an enterprise-class content management system but Cerny estimates that Lansing also eliminated about US$600,000 of annual costs associated with the mismatched hardware and the labor of managing the old servers. For example, using Oracle Collaboration Suite's Oracle Files has helped the college better manage disk space, says Cerny. "Right now, we're saving about US$50,000 on SAN disks that we do not need to buy. Our critical information is more organized, and because it's all in one database, backup is a lot easier. So just the savings alone in terms of maintenance of the old Novell file servers has saved IT quite a bit of money."

Snapshots Lansing Community College www.lansing.cc.mi.us Established in 1957, Lansing Community College is a public two-year college in downtown Lansing, with a student body of approximately 40,000. Location: Lansing, Michigan Industry: Education Oracle products and services: Oracle Discoverer; Oracle Collaboration Suite, including Oracle Voicemail & Fax, Oracle Email, and Oracle Files; Oracle Application Server; Oracle Portal; Oracle E-Business Suite including Financials and Human Resource Management Systems; Oracle Tutor; and Oracle iLearning Western Digital Corporation www.wdc.com Founded in 1970, Western Digital Corporation produces reliable, high-performance hard drives. Location: Lake Forest, California Industry: Manufacturing Oracle products and services: Oracle Collaboration Suite; Oracle E-Business Suite, including Assets, General Ledger, Order Entry, Payables, Purchasing, and Receivables; and Oracle Application Server BDFRMS Hospital www.bdfmedical.org The Bahrain Defense Force Royal Medical Services' hospital is the second-largest hospital in Bahrain, with 400 beds and a comprehensive range of medical services available to military and government staff and other Bahraini residents. Location: Bahrain Industry: Healthcare Oracle products and services: Oracle Database; Oracle Application Server; Oracle Collaboration Suite, including Oracle Files, Oracle Email, Oracle Calendar, Oracle Voicemail & Fax, and Oracle Web Conferencing

Filling a Need

Content management is a big—make that a very big—issue these days. The amount of unstructured content that is critical to business operations—spreadsheets, documents, forms, and so forth—is growing at almost exponential rates. Not only do businesses need to better organize this content for their own benefit but they also need to manage it to comply with increasingly strict governmental regulations and policies.

"If content is scattered all over the company, it is very expensive and tedious to discover it for litigation or compliance purposes. You want to make sure you have control over the content in your organization," says Rakesh Dhoopar, senior director of product strategy for Oracle Collaboration Suite.

Despite the business and legal needs for flexible content management systems, until recently these systems were either process-specific (such as for drug discovery processes or legal firms) and expensive or overly general and ineffective—doing nothing about content management for documents, spreadsheets, or other unstructured data, other than deploying unmanaged file servers to store the unorganized content.

Oracle's vision of content management is filling a need that traditional solutions ignored, says David Yockelson, senior vice president and principal analyst for the META Group. "What hasn't existed is what I would call a content management function for the masses—a low-cost, easy-to-approach way to manage file-based information more effectively, so it's not simply files thrown out on file servers. It's been difficult, if not impossible, to do that on a broad scale, because of the nature of content management products and the pricing of those products," adds Yockelson. "I think that Oracle is different in offering a capability that does a basic job well while incorporating elements of policy (such as records management) and doing so in a way that is more affordable than in the past."

"Oracle is providing enterprise-class solutions that can be deployed to all types of users and be used to manage all your information," says Rich Buchheim, Oracle senior director in charge of product management for all Oracle Collaboration Suite content management products as well as Oracle Content Management SDK (software development kit). "It's content management that enables medium to large companies to consolidate and manage the vast array of unstructured data that exists in their organizations in a simple and practical fashion."

Specifically, to help organizations address their content management needs, Oracle provides Oracle Content Management SDK; Oracle Collaboration Suite; and Oracle Files, a component of Oracle Collaboration Suite. "Oracle Files is a content management application that comes with prepackaged content management capabilities and interfaces, whereas Oracle Content Management SDK is a toolkit (used to create Oracle Files) that organizations can use to integrate content management capabilities into custom applications or address unique requirements," says Buchheim.

For most companies, the starting point for content management is Oracle Files. "Oracle Files is really the first product that allows organizations to consolidate content off different file server repositories into the Oracle database," says Buchheim. "Oracle Files fills the gaps between file servers and high-end traditional enterprise content management systems," Buchheim continues. "We call that 'content management for the rest of us.'"

Content Management and Compliance

Sarbanes-Oxley, which has gotten a lot of press in the U.S., is just one of the many regulations in place in various countries influencing how firms manage their data. For example, in the United Kingdom, it's estimated that nearly 20 new regulations will affect the financial services industry alone in the next two years.

Oracle Content Management

"Although compliance is not expressly an IT issue, it's something that IT is often left to figure out how to instantiate or how to implement in terms of technology," says Yockelson. "There is a clarion call in the compliance area, and IT is beginning to be confronted with the necessity of dealing with a variety of compliance issues and information risk issues. That's why content and records management has become important to IT."

According to Harald Collet, principal product manager for records management and compliance support at Oracle, Oracle Collaboration Suite's architecture supports regulatory compliance as a management platform for unstructured data, which has been estimated to account for as much as 80 percent of overall enterprise information and is typically scattered across hundreds of servers—e-mail servers, file servers, voice-mail systems, calendar reporting servers, and more.

"Increasingly, our customers are not only looking for ways to manage this unstructured data mess but are also facing regulatory requirements for actively managing content. That means they need to have some way of implementing policy across all the different content types, and that's where the records management capabilities in Oracle Files can help," adds Collet.

Beyond Compliant to Mission-Critical

For Western Digital Corp. (WD), a leading manufacturer of hard drives and storage technologies, content management is a key link between its global locations.

"Our Oracle Files-based content management system is mission-critical—it has to be available 24/7 to 1,600 users," explains Srinivas Ramachandruni, senior programmer specialist at WD. "During the daytime in California, most of our engineers are working on design documents and checking them into a globally accessible and highly centralized document repository, whereas our employees in our Asia factories generally work through the night—California time—and need to be able to retrieve those documents for manufacturing purposes."

WD, which went live with the system in August 2004, selected Oracle Files after its decision to replace a legacy application. "We needed to have a system that would allow us to securely put documents in and retrieve them easily, with version control and the ability to associate metadata (such as product categories) with them," says Ramachandruni. "Oracle Files met all our requirements. Oracle also had a significant advantage, because it promised we could deploy—which we did—on a cluster of low-cost production servers from Dell. It was very competitive compared to other products in the market—offering almost 60 percent lower cost."

WD deployed its mission-critical system on two Dell 2650 servers and an Oracle9i Real Application Clusters database running on Linux. For the middle and front tiers, WD deployed two servers each, with load balancing and clustering to demonstrate proof of scalability. "So far it's looking very good. We may not have to scale very soon, because the existing hardware will support us for some time. But we have the hardware to scale up if we need to," says Ramachandruni.

WD is making good use of almost all the Oracle Files features. "We're using version control, the locking mechanism that locks a file if someone's revising it; the WebDAV Interface, enabling the change administrators to drag and drop files into the workspaces; and the out-of-the-box Web UI for end users." In addition, WD implemented the OmniPortlet, an Oracle Portal feature available for Oracle Files, and deployed an easy-to-use Web interface that exposes only a limited number of search fields to end users so they can more quickly get to their files without a lot of training. "The OmniPortlet gives us the capability to expose only those search columns that are needed and most frequently used by the end users of a particular site and then deploy a portlet designed just for them," says Ramachandruni.

So far, WD hasn't turned on the Oracle Workflow feature, which can be used to augment the approval process. Instead, it's relying on a manual process carried out by change administrators. "We will implement Oracle Workflow once we finish bringing all our sites online," adds Ramachandruni.

Using Content Management as an Integration Technique

Hospitals and healthcare organizations are notorious for isolated IT systems and lack of communication between staff, doctors, and patients. But Dr. Mukhtar S.A. Al-Hashimi and his team at the Bahrain Defense Force Royal Medical Services' (BDFRMS) hospital are using Oracle Collaboration Suite along with its component, Oracle Files, to change that and deliver a healthcare environment that integrates information across applications and users as a part of the hospital's prestigious in-house-developed integrated information system, called AL-Care.

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"Most organizations such as ours need to move away from a transactional system focus into knowledge management, which means that you have to search across many scattered systems," says Al-Hashimi. "I think being able to search effectively across all our resources is very important for my IT strategy, because what I'm doing is getting away from the flat-file search and I'm going to the contents of the documents. That gives me a very powerful search tool."

This power tool enables BDFRMS, the second-largest hospital in Bahrain, to provide an integrated, streamlined collaboration environment that enables broader information sharing and facilitates communication. By migrating from Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 to an Oracle-based solution that includes the entire Oracle Collaboration Suite—including Files, Ultra Search, Email, Calendar, Voicemail & Fax—and many other components of the Oracle stack, BDFRMS has made collaboration and content management seamless across a wide variety of systems.

According to Al-Hashimi, using content management is actually a driving engine for his IT strategy. "Oracle Files and Oracle Collaboration Suite are the middle-layer engine—the center part—that can communicate with the individual application islands and bring the individual data sets or elements together, incorporating all the individual systems into an enterprise system," says Al-Hashimi. "Content management is very important for being able to have good control of an organization and being able to tie all the documents and records to the right application or to the right task at the right time."

Content Management from the Ground Up—Oracle Content Management SDK For independent software vendors (ISVs), systems integrators, or organizations with specialized content management requirements, Oracle offers its Content Management SDK for Oracle Application Server. Oracle Content Management SDK is effectively the runtime content management engine along with a series of Java application programming interfaces that support functionality such as checking documents in and out, locking documents, versioning them, or assigning access control policies. It's a middle-tier application that runs on Oracle Application Server and connects to the database, where content and metadata are stored. With the SDK, Oracle provides a starter application and source code that lets firms build their own application. "For building your own user interface, we provide the sample code and starter application—but it's not a production system," says Simon Azriel, principal product manager for Oracle Content Management SDK and Oracle Files. "Most people will use it to build applications." For example, one company used Oracle Content Management SDK to create a mission-critical application that stores day-trading reports in a repository, where all the content is stored in a database backed up by a standby database, with failover for the middle tier. So when should you consider Oracle Content Management SDK instead of Oracle Files? "Oracle Content Management SDK is basically designed for a development-oriented establishment that wants to build its own custom applications and wants to have a secure content repository but doesn't want to go out and buy a full content management application," says Azriel. "On the other hand, Oracle Files is an application—it uses Oracle Content Management SDK functionality to provide a prepackaged content management solution." Oracle Content Management SDK lets developers build their applications around documents and folders without having to worry about how those objects are represented in the tables in the database. "That's one of the big strengths Oracle Content Management SDK provides," says Azriel. "When you've installed it, you can upload your content into the database directly through the protocol servers." In addition, Oracle Content Management SDK provides developers with a wide degree of control over everything from access control lists to permissions, document and folder management, agents for asynchronous processing, and context-based searches using Oracle Text. "Even though we don't market Oracle Content Management SDK extensively, it's an enabling technology that's part of the application server and one we've used quite extensively within Oracle to build things such as Oracle Files, which stores 22 million documents and more than 7 terabytes of data and has more than 40,000 users here at Oracle," says Azriel. "We think it's a very scalable solution for content management. Oracle Content Management SDK has been built to be robust in the face of lots and lots of users, and we're using that robustness for Oracle Files to support tens of thousands of users."

Managing the Future: Oracle Files 10g Oracle Files 10g takes content management to the next level and allows customers to apply policies for better managing the lifecycle of different types of content without changing the way users work. These capabilities improve productivity while heightening and facilitating regulatory compliance across the enterprise. Among the new capabilities in Oracle Files 10g: Improved user management and access control: Oracle Files 10g includes new capabilities for applying security and access control at the folder and document level and provides more-fine-grained control of user permissions. Role-based access control (including customer-defined roles) and access management through groups as well as individual users are also supported. Policy-based lifecycle management: Behaviors controlling the lifecycle of information, such as versioning, automatic attribution, and records management, can be specified through policy on a folder-by-folder basis and can be applied to content manually or automatically. "By utilizing automated policies instead of requiring the user to remember to perform a lot of extra steps, these important lifecycle management capabilities really get used and the risk of user rejection often associated with content management deployments is minimized," says Oracle's Rich Buchheim. Records management: With regulatory compliance issues becoming increasingly important, records management capabilities are a critical enhancement in Oracle Files 10g. Records management provides the ability to specify that a document is to be retained for a certain period of time, to prevent or control changes to the document during the retention period, and to dispose of the document in a prescribed way once the retention period has expired. Web services application programming interfaces (APIs): Oracle Files 10g provides complete access to application functionality programmatically via J2EE- and Microsoft .NET-compatible Web services APIs. These APIs can be leveraged to integrate Oracle Files 10g with other systems and applications (including Oracle E-Business Suite applications and Oracle Portal) and to automate and extend application functionalities. Workflow and business process automation: Oracle Files 10g also includes new capabilities that allow workflows to be associated with specific folders and automatically triggered when events such as checking in or deleting a document occur in those folders. Such event-driven workflows can be used to drive review and approval cycles, notify somebody that a new document version has been checked in, or prevent the deletion of a document from a folder without management permission. "In addition, workflows can now call Oracle Files 10g Web services for performing an extensive set of management actions, enabling the automation of a wide range of business processes," says Buchheim. Enhanced user experience: Last, but certainly not least, Oracle Files 10g delivers an improved experience for both Web and Windows desktop users. A new highly interactive and rich Web interface allows content to be easily accessible anytime, anywhere, from any Web browser. Enhanced integration with Microsoft Windows permits users to access Oracle Files 10g's content and functionalities through Windows Explorer without having to learn a new user interface or client. Finally, Oracle Files 10g features improved offline content management capabilities, allowing users to easily access and manage content when they are disconnected from the network. "Oracle's idea with Oracle Files 10g is to provide these capabilities in a very consumable, approachable manner, so that records management or policy creation and management becomes part and parcel of what you do once you implement Oracle Files and put the document management capability into place," says META Group's David Yockelson.