ECM and Alfresco 1 Enterprise Content Management and Alfresco Compiled by Russ Danner Architect, Christian Science Publishing Society dannerr@csps.com Copyright 2006 Licensed under the Mozilla Public License version 1.1 Summary This document discusses the topic of the enterprise, enterprise content management and explores the aspects of Alfresco ECM (Enterprise Content Management) that uniquely position it as a strong implementation in the content management space among both open source and proprietary competitors. Alfresco is a commercial open source company that was founded in 2005 by Documentum co-founder John Newton and the former CEO of Business Objects John Powell. Alfresco and its community provide a suite of open source, enterprise class content management products and projects.
ECM and Alfresco 2 What is the Enterprise? Breaking down the enterprise into its components is a task which could be carried out at infinitum and ranges from the broad to the domain specific. Strong models for decomposing an enterprise already exist e.g., the Zachman Framework. My intention here is only to go deep enough in decomposing the enterprise to be useful for the purposes of this discussion. When we think of the enterprise as IT professionals we often move directly to enterprise architecture and more specifically we move towards the technology that implements it. Let s resist this temptation for a moment and instead, take a look at an enterprise from 30,000ft. ROLES (PEOPLE) POLICY We could say that at a very high level your enterprise can be decomposed into Policy, Process, Roles and their products. Of course this is a gross oversimplification, but that is the intention. Any assertion / assumption you can make about your enterprise should fall neatly into one of these four areas. Policy is the bottom bedrock of any enterprise. Roles, Process and even product are always subordinated to policy. Our products are an outcome of our process and the roles that perform the processes (according to policy). Product is simply output or outcome. Technology is used to implement and support these concerns.
ECM and Alfresco 3 What is Enterprise Content Management? ECM (Enterprise Content Management) is a broad terminology that means different things depending on who you talk to. This is a fact that you should remain conscious of during any Content Management related discussion. The following areas share space in the content management sphere: Document Management Records Management Web Content Management Digital Rights Management Digital Assets Management Knowledge Management Classification Search and Retrieval Process Facilitation / Workflow Collaboration As you can see the content management space is fascinating in that it the subject is as deep at any one point as it is broad. This is precisely the source of the confusion concerning the identity of content management. The fact is that all of these areas contribute to content management. So where does then Enterprise in ECM come from? CM (Content Management) becomes Enterprise content management when its scope involves enterprise level Policy, Roles, Process, and/or Products. All of these areas provide, consume, and share from a pool of services which was pointed out on John Newton s blog: Content Log. Library Services, which is a catchall term for the basic content operations that differentiate content management from ordinary database management. Library services include basic access, store, check-in, check-out, locking, version control, managing meta-data, and organizing content into folder structures. Auditing of who accesses and updates information can be considered a part of library services. Organization Services provide classification schemes and taxonomies that allow information to be more easily browsed in multiple categories and to confine searches. The most basic form of organization is the use of folders to classify information. Search and retrieval encompasses full-text, metadata and category searches. Full-text has largely been defined by internet search vendors like Google, which have set users expectation on ease of use and speed.
ECM and Alfresco 4 Collaboration services are relatively new and driven by the convergence of groupware into the same space as content management. Collaboration is generally team-focused and revolves around the commenting and annotation of content, project tracking, resource allocation, and issue tracking. Workflow services implement business processes and ensure smooth execution by providing workload balancing and tracking which tasks have been performed and which are overdue. Workflow services are currently undergoing significant change as the result of the industry standardizing on the BPEL4WS standard. Lifecycle services manage the long-term policies concerning and are crucial for enacting archiving and deletion policies of records management. They are also necessary for the control of visibility of content in process the industry generally calls effectivity. Security services control permissions on content that include simple read, write and delete to copying, printing, special properties access and delegation of ownership. Modern security services provide rolebased access control lists with the ability to not only designate who can see content, but also exclude others from acting on content. Transform / Publish services converts content and content components into other formats and aggregates components into finished documents and web pages. Transformation is useful for creating web ready content from other formats. Events / Syndication services are for providing changes and updates of content in a repository and to allow users to subscribe to those changes. RSS is becoming a popular mechanism to provide those changes. High-Availability services bring to content management the ability to provide greater assurance of access and update of content and are provided through: backup and restore; provisioning of a hot standby; or replication to another site or system for closer geographic access or disaster recovery. Administration services provide a dashboard view and control panel for the active content management system; monitors the activities of content services; and ensures that they conform to the service levels required by the enterprise. There are two temptations that should be resisted when thinking about these services and content management in general. First, as it pertains to the services pointed out by John, one should avoid thinking about these as Web Services. Web Service is an implementation. These items have been pointed out and labeled service in a much broader sense.
ECM and Alfresco 5 The second temptation which should be resisted is the desire to immediately consider the technology at all. As we have said in the last section, technology is only the implementation. The most important and valuable aspects of CM are the definitions of the policies you need to enforce, the processes you need to facilitate, the roles which you are going to enable, and the products that will be the output. Once these have been well understood and defined will have a better understanding of what technology is best suited to meet your needs and how it all fits together. Technology is rather simple to define by comparison. Where does CM fall in our definition of the enterprise? Because content management covers such a broad space aspects of it show up in every area of our definition of enterprise. Content management is generally considered at an enterprise scope for precisely this reason. Let s go through the exercise of mapping the ECM services put forth by John Newton to the areas into which we have decomposed our enterprise. Technology POLICY Roles Policy Related Services Library Services Collaboration Services Workflow Services Lifecycle Services Security Services Administration Services High Availability Services Role Related Services Technology ROLES Collaboration Services Workflow Services Security Services Administration Services POLICY Technology ROLES Process Related Services Collaboration Services Workflow Services Transform / Publish Services Notification Services Library Services Organizational Services POLICY
ECM and Alfresco 6 Search and Retrieval Services Technology ROLES Product Related Services Lifecycle Services Transform / Publishing Services POLICY These classifications aren t exhaustive but they are meant to illustrate how the collection of services can be consumed by the different concerns of the enterprise. The mapping also illustrates that there exists some overlap. Now can we talk about technology? Now that we have to some extent decomposed our view of the enterprise and content management we have provided ourselves with a framework to begin looking critically at our business and the technology we need to implement it. Let s flush out the internals of the technology area on our enterprise framework. This structure is not the only way to break down technology but it is similar to common approaches in the industry today. TECHNOLOGY Application Aggregation ROLES (PEOPLE) Software Platform Layer Application Layer Application Services Layer Enterprise Services Layer Systems Layer Hardware Platform Layer Policy and Procedure We break the technology down into layers in order to help understand its role and manage its overall complexity. Here is a brief description of each layer:
ECM and Alfresco 7 Hardware Platform Layer The hardware platform layer is responsible for providing the physical infrastructure on which the software components of the system will execute. It should be noted that although we use the term physical infrastructure Virtualization is addressed in the Hardware Platform Layer Systems Layer The systems platform layer is responsible for addressing Operating Systems, Low level Middleware, and business continuity concerns. Software Platform Layer The software platform layer is responsible for providing the environment for the software components of the system to exist. Definition of this layer is concerned with the subject of Language, Standards, and Design practices. The software platform layer cross cuts all other software layers Enterprise Services Layer The Enterprise Services layer contains highly reusable assets, and processes, and policy enforcement which apply to organizational cross cutting concerns. Application Services Layer Applications are service consumers. Application services provide implementation functionality to the application. Application services compose functionality by implementing domain specific services and consuming enterprise services. Application Layer The application layer is the layer in which user facing functionality emerges. Applications consume services from the Application Services layer. Users can interact directly with the application layer. More often then not a single application will not provide enough functionality for a user to complete his or her tasks on hand; in this case the user will interact with the Application Aggregation. Application Aggregation Layer The application aggregation layer is the layer which user will interact with in most cases. The application aggregation layer is responsible for bringing multiple applications together in to one cohesive user experience.
ECM and Alfresco 8 Mapping ECM to Technology TODO
ECM and Alfresco 9 Applying Alfresco TODO
ECM and Alfresco 10 References Alfresco, Alfresco Enterprise Content Management, http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/roadmap Alfresco, Alfresco Enterprise Web Management, http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/new_web_content_management_plan John Newton, Content Log Enterprise Content Management Services