Tag : HTML

Content Server (CSP) is a great platform to manage documents. You have everything you can expect from a document management system, such as collaboration features, strong permission management, powerful search and clever storage management. If the platform has been well designed and users well supported, Content Server can achieve great things.

However, nowadays, more and more tools have advanced document management features and it put a new pressure on Content Server. For instance, ticketing systems, intranet portals, collaborative/social tools or even PLM platform have now basic document management features. Even harder, there is a strong competition with SaaS applications, such as Box or Dropbox, which are very simple to use and offer advance document management features.

This is why users and clients are always asking more and more of their Content Server. They want to feel that there is huge gap between Content Server abilities and the other tools they have access to. They want more automation from their everyday work. They want a personalized and extremely simplified interface (which is what OpenText will offer with the upcoming Content Server 16). And more generally, they want their documents to be fully integrated in their business processes.

From this analysis, we can note some of the most frequent business requirements:

• Having very controlled workspaces where:
  • Metadata are enforced and follow some specific business rules
  • Documents are automatically named and have a unique number (partially based on their metadata)
  • Document creation is eased and supervised (automatic document generation from templates and metadata / automatic merging of several linked documents)
  • Review and publication process are highly controlled and monitored
  • Smart and clear notifications
  • Action triggers can automatically initiate workflows and complex updates
  • Various powerful reports are available

• Having a simple and contextual user interface where:
  • The interface displayed depends of the user profile;
  • The interface displayed depends of the action / process being executed (I only see the very few features which are related to what I’m currently doing)
  • It can be access from any kind of devices
• Integrating Content Server with multiple third party tools:
  • Being able to retrieve and process information from external systems, such as an ERP or CRM tools (which is what OpenText is doing with its Extended ECM suite)
  • Offering REST APIs on all Content Server features (current REST APIs have a limited access to Content Server features)
  • Offering ready to use REST APIs (using one API call instead of dozen API calls)

Obviously, that is a long list of requirements and it is a tough job to tackle all of them. Depending of your context, you may have solve some of the requirements with some OpenText additional modules, such as Automatic Document Numbering, Active View or Extended ECM. The use of additional modules can greatly improve your Content Server experience and some of them, such as Extended ECM for SAP, are completely outstanding the current competition.

Nevertheless, when you looked at all the requirements we described above, you won’t be able to solve all of them with only additional modules. Many of your needs are probably too specific to your context to be answered by a standard module. You need something more flexible.

This is usually where specific developments come into play. They help giving the flexibility you can’t reach with simple settings. Sometimes, tremendous achievements can be made through specific developments. If you keep them small and simple, they can fix key issues you may encounter for a reasonable cost.

However, as you probably have many requirements, it is hard to restrict the number and the size of the specific developments. And the more of them you have, the more drawbacks you will encounter: undesirable side effects, high maintenance cost (especially when upgrading your platform) and increasing cost of developments. In addition, as developing in OScript is complex and OScript developers are a scarce resource, it can cost quite a large amount of money to make these developments.

Therefore, what you would like to have is a tool which extends features as standard modules do, but which also has the flexibility of specific developments. This is exactly on this idea that the Module Suite of AnswerModules has been built. It offers in particular two components:

• A scripting engine:
  • This engine makes it possible to create scripts which modify the behavior of Content Server (as a specific development would do)
  • However, this engine is much more efficient than OScript developments:
    • It is using more than 1 500 APIs which makes it possible to reach nearly all Content Server features and in a much easier way than you can do with OScript
    • You do not need to restart Content Server to deploy a new script (in contrary to a module installation)
    • The scripts are built with Groovy, an open language based on java and with a huge community around the world, which makes it easier to find a developer
    • Scripts are supported by the Module Suite and therefore do not modify the core code of Content Server. Therefore, you won’t encounter side effects and you won’t need additional efforts when upgrading your platform: you will only need to install the new version of the Module Suite
  • In addition, the scripting engine APIs can be easily extended to communicate with third party systems (creating external APIs to consume information from external systems or offering specific REST APIs to provide specific information to external systems)

• A form framework:
  • This framework makes it easy to create modern and beautiful forms, which can be used in multiple situations in Content Server
  • You no longer need to do HTML coding to create forms: you only need to drag & drop the fields you want to have and choose how to display them
  • Your form is fully responsive design and therefore can be displayed on any devices
  • It can be combined with the scripting engine to automate certain actions and to automatically filled some fields

If you use these two components (and some other AnswerModules features I didn’t describe here), you should be able to answer all your business requirements. At Aerow, we have been early adopters of the Module Suite and we strongly believe that AnswerModules is the future of Content Server. It gives you the flexibility that you should have on every enterprise software.

With this module, you can even go further than “just” improving your Content Server. You can even create complete applications, such as a training application, a photo library or a ticketing system. It will probably be not as powerful as a dedicated tool, but it is still possible to create pretty useful applications.

If you want a more concrete view of how far you can go with AnswerModules, you can have a look at the two kickstart applications (a purchase management and a vendor invoice management applications) that AnswerModules have developed. It will give you a better view of what the scripting engine and the form framework are.

If you are interested by what I have described above, you can come on the 9^th March at the OpenText Innovation Tour (workshop at 3.35pm). AnswerModules and Aerow will held a session together and we will describe a concrete use case of the Module Suite.

Wrote by Eric Carbonel, Senior Consultant – AEROW