Open Source ECM, with the emphasis on the “E”

Unstructured information represents 80% of the content within today’s enterprises and government organizations, and the amount of it is growing rapidly. The reasons for controlling and managing this information are myriad, ranging from employee productivity to consistent branding to customer service to legal compliance.

The components of “enterprise content management” that address these areas include document management, records management, image management, web content management, digital asset management, email management, collaboration, and a few others. The broad range of these technical areas have helped put the “enterprise” into ECM. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that an entire enterprise can benefit from ECM.

Due to the high cost of traditional ECM software, its rollout across a typical enterprise has been stunted. Generally, we find that ECM technology is utilized by only 20% of an enterprise.

So we have a large gap: 100% of employees generate/update/utilize enterprise content, but ECM technologies reach only 20% of those employees. A majority of enterprise content is thus unmanaged, negatively impacting productivity, customer loyalty, compliance, etc.

Enter open source, with its fundamental cost advantages.

But can an open source approach really address the broad range of “enterprise” content management? To date, most open source content management software has focused on web content — leading examples include Joomla, eZ publish, Plone, Drupal, and Typo3 (relatedy, almost a quarter of the web is powered by an open source cms). And a few, including Alfresco and Magnolia, provide robust collaborative document management capabilities.

But until just a few days ago, it was near impossible to craft open source solutions for records management, business process management, and scanned document image management.

Enter Alfresco’s preview release of version 1.4, which includes basic support for records management:

Alfresco Launches First Open Source Records Management Solution

and for business process management, complex workflow, and scanned document management:

Alfresco Extends Leadership With Production Ready Open Source Business Process Management

Bottom line: an open source approach to full “E”CM is looking more and more feasible.

Scanning, OCR, and Alfresco

We’re looking forward to the upcoming release of the Kofax integration with Alfresco. The project is led by our friends at Aarden Ringcroft, who just gave me a demo of the latest version.

More details are on the Alfresco wiki. Here are some excerpts:

“Integrating Kofax and Alfresco provides complete Content Management support including capture, management and publishing of Content. Kofax captures content from all kinds of sources usually via scanning & OCR. The captured information is then “released” to Alfresco, for it to be managed in an ad-hoc manner or via pre-defined business processes.”

and…

“The following information will be captured via a UI Dialog allowing configuration of the Release script.

1. Alfresco Server Connection Details (username, password, repository instance)
2. Destination Alfresco Folder where Kofax captured information should be placed
3. Mapping of Kofax captured information (meta-data, tiff, ocr and pdf renditions) to Alfresco Content Model
   • Kofax Document Class -> Alfresco Content Type (Content or sub-type of Content)
   • Kofax Index Value (as extracted from document by Kofax) -> Alfresco Property (of appropriate data type)
   • Kofax Tiff, OCR or PDF document -> Alfresco Property (of binary data type)”

In other words, scan your documents, forms, etc., with one of the leading scanning platforms, automatically recognize the contents (typed characters, check marks, hand writing, etc.), assign relevant meta-data, and automatically insert the image, meta-data, and converted text into a corresponding content item within the Alfresco repository.

Once in the repository, the document and its contents are available for enterprise search using Alfresco’s built-in search engine, where searches may be performed on the full-text and/or on the meta-data fields. Other benefits of managing your scanned documents within Alfresco include: secure access, records management/archiving for compliance purposes, seamless integration with other enterprise applications (e.g., via an enterprise portal), improved workflow and business process management, among others.

Stay tuned for an upcoming webcast that we will have on this topic, including a demo of the Kofax/Alfresco integration.