IBM: Offerings Enable Customers To Achieve Greater Business Agility
IBM recently announced new Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions that are designed to help organizations achieve greater business agility and workplace effectiveness.
Recognizing the need for more nimble, adaptable technology, IBM's agile ECM portfolio provides improved flexibility to help business users respond faster to changing business requirements. The new solutions will allow customers to optimize content-based operational and compliance processes.
Unifying content, process and compliance capabilities in a new composite application framework, IBM's agile ECM enables clients to quickly solve increasingly complex business problems. Using a flexible, services-oriented environment, clients can now deploy solution applications within days instead of months. With this new offering, IBM is helping clients accelerate time-to-value, improving end-user accessibility and allowing business professionals to optimize their content-based processes.
Further, IBM's agile ECM portfolio helps clients realize IBM's Information On Demand vision. It makes it easier for business users to connect content in the context of their business processes and leverage that information to facilitate business optimization.
"Organizations need information to innovate and optimize their businesses, but many struggle with how to manage all the information that they have," said Ken Bisconti, vice president, products and strategy, IBM Enterprise Content Management. "IBM's focus on agility with ECM software helps clients address many important challenges, such as how to globally integrate solutions with immense volumes of information and optimize their processes while managing regulatory requirements." For example, construction field personnel have frequent interaction with multiple contractors, inspecting their work and documenting their progress on various projects. Many documents are necessary for the accurate record keeping and reporting of all construction activity. Information captured on paper forms, which are then filed in a project book or transcribed into an online data storage system, can be flawed by delays in data entry, damaged paper forms and errors during transcription. With an agile, end-to-end ECM business process, these documents can be digitally authored and managed and contextual information, such as maps and equipment inventory, can now be electronically delivered to the contractors in the field instantly, improving speed, reducing errors as well as reducing overall project costs.
IBM Agile ECM Software Portfolio The volume of information, the number of different information types and the multi-channel communications world an organization deals with continue to grow dramatically. With globalization and changing market conditions, organizations need to access information instantly. Utilizing an IBM service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach, IBM's agile ECM portfolio is designed to address these growing market needs.
Key enhancements in IBM ECM portfolio include: IBM FileNet P8 4.5 is a unified ECM platform that combines content with Business Process Management (BPM) and compliance capabilities. FileNet P8 4.5 has been significantly enhanced across all of its core modules. Highlights include: IBM FileNet Business Process Manager 4.5 is a comprehensive, enterprise-class offering for managing content-centric business processes. It supports business user-oriented and standards-based process modeling and simulation, promotes business user and IT collaboration, and provides tools for agile ECM application development, utilizing Smart SOA and Web 2.0 technologies such as mashups. This new offering enables users to launch FileNet BPM processes for content in multiple repositories including IBM Content Manager 8 (CM8). This seamless integration to IBM CM8 allows a FileNet BPM process to make changes to IBM CM8 content thru IBM CM8-specific content operations.
IBM FileNet Content Manager 4.5 is designed to provide clients with a scalable, single content catalog that embeds IBM's content-centric BPM and compliance capabilities into an ECM platform operating on content in multiple repositories. The enhanced FileNet Content Manager enables intuitive integration with Lotus Quickr, Microsoft Office 2007, and Microsoft SharePoint, allowing users choice while interacting with and benefiting from ECM capabilities. FileNet Content Manager has also implemented a component-based content model leveraging the DITA XML standard, now broadly adopted in the industry for advanced document management applications. DITA supports agility through the reuse of document components in support of diverse authoring and publishing requirements.
IBM Content Manager 8.4.1 manages all types of digitized content across multiple platforms, databases and applications. The new offering provides active content capabilities which allow content in CM8 to participate in IBM FileNet BPM 4.5 processes. Additionally CM8.4.1 has been enhanced to support collaborative content management through integration with Lotus Quickr and includes new Web Interface (WEBi) enhancements that support Web 2.0 style interaction.
IBM Content Manager on Demand (CMOD) 8.4.1 provides advanced enterprise report management. The latest CMOD offering includes integration to IBM FileNet P8 for federated Records Management and BPM applications.
In addition, the new IBM ECM products use the same technology as IBM's recently released compliance and discovery offerings: The IBM Content Collection and Archiving family is based on a modular, extensible architecture that helps enable organizations to take back control and unlock business value of content, while enforcing compliance and operational policies.
IBM's records management offerings are a prescriptive set of deployment and management practices, tools and best practices to eliminate deployment complexity, mitigate risks associated with lack of best practices and industry skill and knowledge shortages.
IBM's eDiscovery products help clients take the cost out of electronic discovery management. The offerings provide an integrated, in-house approach that helps control stored information and litigation response across the enterprise.
IBM FileNet P8 integration with IBM Content Analyzer enables organizations to increase the return on their enterprise content investment by analyzing unstructured content together with structured data to gain valuable, even business-changing insight from all information.
IBM also announced that it has extended the IBM Lotus Quickr collaboration software line to include IBM ECM Services for Lotus Quickr, further helping businesses of all sizes manage, share and collaborate on important information. Available in December, IBM Lotus Quickr version 8.1.1 will be the first software of its kind to integrate with documents, spreadsheets and other files that reside in IBM enterprise content management systems. This new integration between IBM Lotus Quickr and IBM's ECM offerings will allow Lotus Quickr 8.1.1 and IBM ECM users - both IBM FileNet P8 and IBM Content Manager 8 users - to collaborate on business content via Quickr while leveraging IBM's comprehensive enterprise content management infrastructure.
This technology advancement will allow employees to access enterprise content and programs so it can be easily accessed across the organization. This content includes every day business applications like e-mail, presentations and spreadsheets and complicated records management and business process management programs.
The new software will allow organization with a variety of IT applications to standardize on Lotus Quickr for team collaboration and social networking needs without the hassle of complex data migration.
IBM is the only company with an integrated portfolio that spans from team collaboration and basic content services to advanced enterprise content management.
For more information on IBM's agile Enterprise Content Management offerings, visit: http://www.ibm.com/software/data/content-management/agile-ecm/
SOURCE: IBM