Oracle Outlines ECM Strategy
By CXOtoday Staff
Mumbai, Apr 20, 2007

Oracle, over the next 12 years, will release five upgraded enterprise content management (ECM) products to integrate its own product line with that of Stellent, a company it purchased in December 2006.

The ECM suite will encompass three products based on Stellent technology: Universal Content Management, Universal Records Management and Imaging and Process Management. These products will be integrated components of Oracle's Fusion Middleware product family.

Universal Content Management, Stellent's flagship product, will be enhanced to allow enterprises to store both content and metadata in Oracle databases, rather than storing content in a file system and metadata in a database. The product also will integrate with Oracle application servers, identity management software and Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g. The product can run on a variety of databases, though, not just Oracle's.

The Universal Records Management product will be updated to allow enterprises to manage content across a wider variety of data sources. This is a comprehensive solution for applying records retention management policies to content distributed across different repositories and applications.

The upcoming release of Oracle Imaging and Process Management, which automates back-office operations such as processing invoices and claims forms, will have an enhanced ability to use standards-based workflows.

Another product Oracle will update in the next year is Information Rights Management, which also is based on Stellent technology. This product lets companies enforce access rights policies for documents when they leave the content management system, even when a file has been copied onto a user's system and e-mailed to someone else as an attachment.

The products [based on Stellent technology] will allow Oracle's content services to focus on the markets where it's had the most traction to date, such as file services consolidation. File services consolidation is the ability to take documents spread across different servers and put them into a single repository where it is easy to back them up.

The fifth product to be updated in the next year -- and the only one that was already an Oracle offering -- is Oracle Content Database Suite, which supports file server and archive consolidation as well as a content repository for enabling and building content-centric applications.

The new version will provide basic content services with a user interface that lets users manage personal information. The database suite was previously known as Oracle Content Services.

"We are excited that we were able to quickly integrate the content management solutions we acquired last year with Oracle's industry-leading technology stack to create products that have unequalled scalability and security along with broad support of 3rd party systems," said Thomas Kurian, Oracle Senior Vice President, Server Technologies. "The new Enterprise Content Management Suite will offer an exceptional opportunity for organizations to standardize on a single content management platform that provides web content, document, digital asset and records management along with highly scalable imaging capabilities

"Oracle is committed to providing our customers with the industry's most comprehensive and unified content management platform," said Dan Ryan, senior vice president, Oracle Content Management Development. "In our information age, content management software is mission- critical. Content management is used to directly build and deploy applications, as well as provide content and content services to other enterprise applications. Organizations are looking for strategic partners who can support their complete range of content management needs. Only Oracle has this capability, and only Oracle has the ability to support their broader information management needs addressing all types of information, structured and unstructured. "

Oracle did not release pricing details or the exact release dates for the five planned product upgrades.

It may be noted that Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 represents a huge amount of new code that is likely to see significant revisions over the next two years.