MANAGING CONTENT IN THE
DATABASE: CONTENT
MANAGEMENT DONE RIGHT
The future of content management today
REQUIREMENTS
JANUARY, 2005
• Manage unstructured and structured
content
• Find information across the enterprise
• Functionality needed for user adoption
• Scalability necessary for success
Unstructured content, such as email and electronic documents, makes up
more than 80 percent of all business information. What if it could be
managed in a database—the same way that structured content, like
financial data, has been managed for years?
Oracle’s Approach: Build it from the Ground Up
In 1999, Oracle approached content management with that simple question in mind. The
result was a technology known as the Internet File System (now called Content
Management Software Developer Kit or CM SDK) .The idea was to store all components
of information—content, metadata, and relationships—within the tables of an Oracle
database. Software running in mid-tier servers would present the information in the
database to users through various popular protocols, such as Windows Explorer or any
Web browser. The solution delivered all the benefits traditionally associated with
managing information in a database, yet remained completely transparent to users,
requiring virtually no change in the way they worked.
While the premise behind the product was relatively simple, practical implementation
required several years of tuning and scaling before CM SDK was ready for prime time.
Since 2000, more than 2,500 customers have used the highly scalable and robust
technology as the infrastructure for building content management applications, ranging
from basic document managers to comprehensive enterprise content management
solutions.
In 2000, Oracle built an out-of-the-box file and content management application on the
CM SDK infrastructure. The resulting product, Oracle Files, shipped in 2002 after an
internal implementa