Enterprise Content Management

The goal of eXo ECM is to provide as much functionality in each area to provide Open Source alternatives that rely on Open standards to proprietary solutions such as Documentum or Interwoven ones.

Capture

We provide several ways to submit structured or unstructured content (Microsoft Office documents) into the repository. It is indeed possible to import XML format (as defined by the JCR API and introduced in the previous section), submit web forms that are generated thanks to the document structure (see dialog templates for more explanation) or upload content thanks to WebDAV (also described in the JCR section). The XML import is an important one as thanks to Extract, Transform and Load tools (ETL) it is possible to inject documents that were loaded from several different types of devices such as scanners.

Storing

The eXo store is relying on our JCR implementation presented in the previous section. The default real store location is a DB one. In mid term we will provide several other back end implementations that can act as connectors to other CMS or Data Warehouses. In all cases, those contents will only be accessible through the normalized JCR API. Searching, locking, versioning as well as security functionalities are part of the store ECM layer.

Manage

That layer is the one that adds the most value on top of the Storing one as it contains all the techniques to share documents in the Organization. Our ECM implementation includes a set of powerful portlets to view, create, move and monitor structured and unstructured documents all over the JCR workspaces. In that implementation, it is mandatory to bind the JCR NodeType concept with templates that will dynamically build the forms to create new nodes or render the already created ones. We have also introduced the concept of "Document Lifecycle Actions" that allows a custom action (that can be a Business Rule, a Groovy Script or a Business Process) to be launched either when the document is newly added, removed or viewed. That model allows for example to manage advanced document validation operations as well as ordering document publication and backup at dedicated dates. Furthermore, thanks to the use of portal communities that can manage pages with ECM portlets, it is very easy to address collaboration and document sharing among the same groups.

Publish

Web publication is of course a very important functionality and we do provide a display portlet that points to JCR directories, extract the children and render them using the previously introduced templates. That way, contents can be seen in the company intra or extranet as well as on mobile devices as the portal supports them. The Action concept also allows providing a mechanism to publish content through interesting channels such as email. Furthermore, thanks to the JCR export functionality, it is possible to create a XML file out of a document tree and to send it to partners. WebServices can be used in this scenario. We will support some other XML syntaxes such as RSS and plain RDF as soon as possible.

Backup

Critical documents and information must be preserved in safe places, usually in different physical location as the other data and on long life hardware. Of course eXo does not cover the hardware ECM part but allows the abstraction of them thanks to JCR workspace. Indeed, by introducing a Backup workspace built on top of a different data sources and by populating it thanks to the Action concept we insure data preservation.

Others

• Drives Concept
• Folksonomy Concept
• Taxonomy Concept
• Metadata Concept
• Action concept
• Browse Content Portlet : rendering the content to the portal
• Explorer+Views+
• JCR Hierarchy