Enterprise Content Integration
Encyclopedia
Enterprise content integration (ECI) is a middleware
software technology, often used within large organizations, that connects together various types of computer systems that manage documents and digital content. ECI systems often work in tandem with other technologies such as enterprise content management
, document management, groupware, and records management
. It takes a decentralized approach in order to manage content from various resources. ECI implementations exist on a tier above the organization’s existing software and provide wide-ranging search, indexing, and access functions.
Enterprise content integration aims to answer a number of needs in today's organizations:
catalog that contains records regarding data throughout the enterprise in order to enable users to seek, browse, locate, and retrieve the necessary information. ECI metadata catalogs are able to collect data from a wide array of sources, including digital asset management
systems, file
and web
servers, and individual users’ PCs
. Vendors sometimes refer to this sort of decentralized content management as a virtual repository or a virtual file system
.
In addition to gathering data for the metadata catalog, some ECI systems are able to connect to the resources offered by a computer system directly through an interface such as an API. These types of connections are often referred to as adapters, connectors, or content bridges by ECI vendors.
ECI systems can also offer automated aggregation, packaging, and distribution of indexed content through administrator-configurable channels, which allows flexible reporting and powerful analytic capabilities across a wide array of data sources. ECI administrators can design the system by specifying rules for the way indexed content should be packaged as well as how and to whom the content should be delivered. To accomplish these goals, some ECI systems are able to integrate with other computer systems such as publishing systems and format converters, often through web service
interfaces.
); their Interchange Platform (now known as Interchange Suite 3.0) provided several cutting-edge features, including a dashboard interface for monitoring the flow of content and the creation of metadata, a component that allowed the definition of relationships among collected data, and a packaging and distribution function.
Agari Mediaware was another company among those in the first wave of ECI solution providers. However, the company filed for bankruptcy in July of 2003. This was likely due to the poor market reception of the product; it was viewed by many implementers as an architecture rather than a complete solution, and most companies desired a solution that could be quickly put into place and enabled with a minimum of additional effort.
Other vendors of ECI systems include Day Software, EntropySoft, and SeeUnity, all of which offer a variety of connectors to various content management systems.
Middleware
Middleware is computer software that connects software components or people and their applications. The software consists of a set of services that allows multiple processes running on one or more machines to interact...
software technology, often used within large organizations, that connects together various types of computer systems that manage documents and digital content. ECI systems often work in tandem with other technologies such as enterprise content management
Enterprise content management
Enterprise Content Management is a formalized means of organizing and storing an organization's documents, and other content, that relate to the organization's processes...
, document management, groupware, and records management
Records management
Records management, or RM, is the practice of maintaining the records of an organization from the time they are created up to their eventual disposal...
. It takes a decentralized approach in order to manage content from various resources. ECI implementations exist on a tier above the organization’s existing software and provide wide-ranging search, indexing, and access functions.
Functions
ECI systems attempt to address the growing trend of the recognition that so-called “unstructured content,” such as a series of documents, can be important and can contribute to business development. Their other important function lies in their ability to increase the efficiency which with organizations can retrieve data by providing a single channel to access a wide variety of storage locations.Enterprise content integration aims to answer a number of needs in today's organizations:
- Migrating content (documents and images) from one system to another
- Synchronizing part or all the content between two or more content repositories
- Searching for documents across all content repositories
- Offering a single point of access to all documents and content of the organization
- Publishing or pushing this content to other systems (enterprise portals, web sites)
Features
ECI functions through the use of a metadataMetadata
The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...
catalog that contains records regarding data throughout the enterprise in order to enable users to seek, browse, locate, and retrieve the necessary information. ECI metadata catalogs are able to collect data from a wide array of sources, including digital asset management
Digital asset management
Digital asset management consists of management tasks and decisions surrounding the ingestion, annotation, cataloguing, storage, retrieval and distribution of digital assets...
systems, file
File server
In computing, a file server is a computer attached to a network that has the primary purpose of providing a location for shared disk access, i.e. shared storage of computer files that can be accessed by the workstations that are attached to the computer network...
and web
Web server
Web server can refer to either the hardware or the software that helps to deliver content that can be accessed through the Internet....
servers, and individual users’ PCs
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
. Vendors sometimes refer to this sort of decentralized content management as a virtual repository or a virtual file system
Virtual file system
A virtual file system or virtual filesystem switch is an abstraction layer on top of a more concrete file system. The purpose of a VFS is to allow client applications to access different types of concrete file systems in a uniform way...
.
In addition to gathering data for the metadata catalog, some ECI systems are able to connect to the resources offered by a computer system directly through an interface such as an API. These types of connections are often referred to as adapters, connectors, or content bridges by ECI vendors.
ECI systems can also offer automated aggregation, packaging, and distribution of indexed content through administrator-configurable channels, which allows flexible reporting and powerful analytic capabilities across a wide array of data sources. ECI administrators can design the system by specifying rules for the way indexed content should be packaged as well as how and to whom the content should be delivered. To accomplish these goals, some ECI systems are able to integrate with other computer systems such as publishing systems and format converters, often through web service
Web service
A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...
interfaces.
Vendors
A number of vendors have provided ECI solutions through the history of the technology. One of the first was Context Media (now owned by OracleOracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...
); their Interchange Platform (now known as Interchange Suite 3.0) provided several cutting-edge features, including a dashboard interface for monitoring the flow of content and the creation of metadata, a component that allowed the definition of relationships among collected data, and a packaging and distribution function.
Agari Mediaware was another company among those in the first wave of ECI solution providers. However, the company filed for bankruptcy in July of 2003. This was likely due to the poor market reception of the product; it was viewed by many implementers as an architecture rather than a complete solution, and most companies desired a solution that could be quickly put into place and enabled with a minimum of additional effort.
Other vendors of ECI systems include Day Software, EntropySoft, and SeeUnity, all of which offer a variety of connectors to various content management systems.