MANAGING CONTENT
IN THE DATABASE: CONTENT MANAGEMENT DONE RIGHT
By Rich Buchheim, Harald Collet
Oracle Corporation
The future of content management today
Unstructured content, such as email and electronic documents, makes
up more than 80 percent of all business information. What if it could
be managed in a database—the same way that structured content,
like financial data, has been managed for years?
Oracle’s Approach: Build it from the Ground Up
In 1999, Oracle approached content management with that simple question
in mind. The result was a technology known as the Internet File System
(now called Content Management Software Developer Kit or CM SDK) .The
idea was to store all components of information—content, metadata,
and relationships—within the tables of an Oracle database. Software
running in mid-tier servers would present the information in the database
to users through various popular protocols, such as Windows Explorer
or any Web browser. The solution delivered all the benefits traditionally
associated with
managing information in a database, yet remained completely transparent
to users, requiring virtually no change in the way they worked.
While the premise behind the product was relatively simple, practical
implementation required several years of tuning and scaling before
CM SDK was ready for prime time. Since 2000, more than 2,500 customers
have used the highly scalable and robust technology as the infrastructure
for building content management applications, ranging from basic document
managers to comprehensive enterprise content management solutions.
In 2000, Oracle built an out-of-the-box file and content management
application on the CM SDK infrastructure. The resulting product, Oracle
Files, shipped in 2002 after an internal implementation to Oracle employees
that began in 2000.
Oracle Files: 40,000 Users Collaborating on 19 Million Documents
Before Oracle deployed Oracle Files in 2000, the company had more
than 1,000 file servers scattered all over the world. More than 33
full-time-equivalent (FTE) system engineers supported these servers.
Meanwhile, users experienced excessive server downtime and found it
difficult to collaborate and locate content. Most employees were sending
documents as attachments to email and maintaining multiple copies of
documents on their local desktops—driving up network traffic,
increasing storage costs, and creating serious data integrity issues.
It seemed a Herculean task to gain control over the company’s
content and knowledge, fragmented across so many repositories.
Today, three years after the first employees started collaborating
using Oracle Files, the system is among the world’s largest content
and knowledge management environments. High user acceptance played
a huge part in the success of Oracle Files as a content management
system. Nearly 75 percent of Oracle’s employees log in at least
once every 20 days to share and collaborate on content, while 70 percent
of content is shared in workspaces with a defined set of team members
and access levels. Typically, more than 2,500 users are on the system
at any point during the work day and users add about 30,000 documents
to the system daily—a steady stream of knowledge that other users
and teams can leverage, build on, and share.
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