Tame Your Content
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"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.
"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."
David A. Kelly is a business, technology, and travel writer who lives in West Newton, Massachusetts.
For more information on this article contact Donna Williams at donna.williams@oracle.com
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