By David. A. Kelly Submitted by Oracle

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."

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.

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