Content Integration is a critical technology helping companies trying to organize content
management. It is the answer to the enterprise’s wish to integrate all its content repositories with
its business applications and enterprise portal, as well as facilitate information lifecycle
management.
Electronic documents are at the core of the enterprise. They are an elementary part of its
memory. Documents are used by all business units and their lifecycles are tightly linked to
business activity.
In the current economic climate, it is necessary to continually improve the responsiveness, the
performance and the governance of the company. Decision-makers strive to optimize the use of
these assets.
Content Integration focuses primarily on the following areas of improvement:
- Easier access to and better management of knowledge assets of the company
- Faster and tighter integration of the information system
- Increase of the ROI of existing systems while making the most of their contents
The main obstacle to achieving these goals is the fragmentation and heterogeneity of the
applications that contain files and documents in the company.
This fragmentation usually has three causes:
1- the historical choice of each department to acquire a solution that answers its specific needs;
the result is that each department deploys different content repositories.
2- every year there are new technologies in the marketplace and every software vendor pushes
its own content repository.
3- external growth. The high number of mergers and acquisitions leads to numerous
heterogeneous information systems that have to be integrated in just one organization.
The consequences of this fragmentation are generating integration nightmares for the IT
department. Even though content repositories are multiplying, all vertical applications must
have access to all of them to benefit from the most efficient business-driven information.
The central problem is therefore how to manage integration between all the content
repositories and b