MANAGING CONTENT IN THE DATABASE: CONTENT MANAGEMENT DONE RIGHT
The future of content management today
REQUIREMENTS
• Manage unstructured and structured
JANUARY, 2005
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.
content
• Find information across the enterprise • Functionality needed for user adoption • Scalability necessary for success
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 implementation to Oracle employees that began in 2000.
Oracle Files: 40,000 Users Collaborating on 19 Million Documents Before Oracle deployed Oracle Files in 2000, the company had more than 1,000 file servers scattered all over the world. More than 33 full-time-equivalent (FTE) system engineers supported these servers. Meanwhile, users experienced excessive server downtime and found it difficult to collaborate and locate content. Most employees were sending documents as attachments to email and maintaining multiple copies of documents on their local desktops—driving up network traffic, increasing storage costs, and creating serious data integrity issues. It seemed a Herculean task to gain control over
the company’s content and knowledge, fragmented across so many repositories.
Today, three years after the first employees started collaborating using Oracle Files, the system is among the world’s largest content and knowledge management environments.
High user acceptance played a huge part in the success of Oracle Files as a content management system. Nearly 75 percent of Oracle’s employees log in at least once every 20 days to share and collaborate on content, while 70 percent of content is shared in workspaces with a defined set of team members and access levels. Typically, more than 2,500 users are on the system at any point during the work day and users add about 30,000 documents to the system daily—a steady stream of knowledge that other users and teams can leverage, build on, and share.
Oracle’s implementation: Possibly the largest document management system in the world
Current Registered Users Total Number of Users in Last 20 days Average User Concurrency Number of Documents Documents in Workspaces Number of Workspaces
Table 1: Oracle Corporation’s Document Management System (January, 2005)
Approximately 40,000 34,975 Approximately 2,500 21,609,983 17,145,796 70,059 Approximately 30,000 17.4TB (7.1TB utilized) 2 Mid-tier running 9 Dell 1u 2x4s on Linux, database tier running Sun E650 on Solaris, NetApp storage for all content
Daily Rate of Document Addition Size of Database Repository Administrators of System (FTE) Hardware Configuration today
Today, nearly 100 percent of Oracle employees are using Oracle Files. A more detailed analysis of usage patterns reveals that the number of daily authenticated users has grown 580 percent in three years, from 2,313 to 15,732. System usage has also intensified from a data retrieval perspective: users download 6.4MB daily on average, more than double the amount when the system was launched. The large amount of data retrieved testifies to the quality of the information—users find relevant information that helps speed up business processes and drive cross-organizational collaboration.
Here’s the kicker. This enormous amount of content that Oracle employees have created resides in one single database. Not in 1000 file servers, not in multiple repositories, but in
Growth in Oracle Files Usage
8.00 Daily Retrieval Per Active user (MB) 15,732 Users 6.00 6.36MB 12,000 4.00 3.46MB 2.00 2,313 Users 0.00 11/13/2001 1/11/2005 3,000 0 9,000 6,000 18,000 15,000 Authenticated Users
one single database with more than six terabytes of intellectual capital. The ability to store and manage all electronic company knowledge in one place offers numerous benefits, not least the ability to leverage this knowledge and to provide employees and increasingly other internal business processes with one “single source of truth.” Once content is no longer fragmented, the database environment offers endless opportunities to manage, integrate, and publish content in ways that offer incremental business value. Organic Adoption Oracle’s rollout of Files occurred in two phases. In October 2000, Oracle Files went into production for a limited number of the company’s employees—about 15,000 around the world. The second phase began the following March with a rollout to all 40,000 employees worldwide. Rather than making it a corporate mandate to use Oracle Files, system utilization grew organically. Nor was time-consuming training on the program—users simply signed up for accounts and started using the system. Within a few months, word-of-mouth quickly drove new users to the system. Since the application is directly accessible from Windows Explorer and Microsoft Office, employees can save content right into their workspaces managed in the database. Eventually the productivity benefits of Oracle Files drove 75 percent of users to choose Oracle Files as their favorite means of sharing and collaborating on content.Dramatic Improvements in Employee and Team Collaboration
The real benefit of Oracle Files is dramatically improved employee and team collaboration at Oracle. The amount of duplication has been substantially reduced since employees can now access their content from anywhere using any browser—instead of creating document copies on the desktop. The typical “email attachment approach” to collaboration around a document has been almost completely replaced with links (URLs) to the content residing in the database. This not only reduces network bandwidth consumption, but also saves users from having their email in-boxes clogged with large file attachments. For mobile employees, trying to download large—sometimes
irrelevant—email attachments over a phone line is a real productivity drag. Now they can choose what attachments to download from Files—cutting the time spent waiting for email to download, and eliminating wasted time staying under email quotas.
The quality of the content stored in Oracle Files has improved with tools like versioning, access controls, document locking, and approval workflows. The routing of documents for approval allows employees to apply a workflow to any document. Once the approval workflow is complete, the workflow takes action on the content, such as publishing it in a public folder for viewing. The combination of workflow and the single source of truth delivered by Oracle Files heightens the usability of the content managed—and builds user momentum faster since it helps employees get their jobs done more quickly.
Searching and finding information is another major drag on productivity. Oracle’s employees now find online content using a simple search across all their content and workspaces in Oracle Files. Initially, it was challenging to search across the millions of documents stored in the system, but using a scalable search indexing engine, employees can now search Oracle Files even faster than searching on their own desktops.
For end users, the most important aspect was that they didn’t have to change the way they work. Using Windows applications or the Files Web interface, employees save content directly into the database. The key to the high user acceptance of the system has been this tight integration with the desktop environment, which makes it attractive to collaborate using Oracle Files.
Oracle has fulfilled the promise of knowledge management with this single source of truth approach for every employee. The core benefit of knowledge management is not losing the content, which encourages every employee to use the system regularly. Indeed, Oracle Files helps employees find, use, and share the appropriate content with the right people—benefits that deliver 80 percent of what real knowledge management is about. Reduced IT Costs Oracle realized truly astounding hard IT savings from Oracle Files. Oracle went from 1,000 servers in 1998 to a single system with one database in 2002. The IT system administrator headcount to support the system worldwide went from 33 to just two administrators today. This workforce optimization allowed Oracle to redeploy the existing engineers toward revenue-generating activities instead of spending time maintaining a non-differentiating IT environment like NT file servers.
Today, Oracle is taking the next step in cost savings and availability by deploying Oracle Files on the Oracle 10g database. This will enable the company to run a configuration of inexpensive Linux mid-tier and Dell database servers using the grid technology that ships
with the database. Oracle expects this configuration to allow the company to run Oracle Files for the entire company on computer hardware costing less than $100,000. The simplicity of the Oracle Files architecture is exactly what allows a global company like Oracle to cut IT costs by millions of dollars every year.
Risk Management and Corporate Compliance Efforts are Fortified Many companies are overwhelmed with regulatory requirements impacting their enterprise. These range from Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and SEC regulations to local and state breach and disclosure laws. For many businesses today, getting unstructured content in the database and under control through Oracle Files is the right first step for regulatory compliance and legal risk management.
Oracle Files strengthens risk management and corporate compliance efforts at Oracle. By applying consistent information and system management policies and using database and access controls that can lock down information, Oracle has taken the most important steps toward managing content for compliance.
Oracle’s Finance Department is one particularly active group of Files users. They use the system for financial planning and to coordinate documents associated with closing the books every quarter. Specifically, the department uses Oracle Files to assist with: • • • • • Budget and financial forecasting Operations review, ISO corrective documentation, and corrective action management Providing information to Oracle Finance Web sites Collaboration on project plans between multiple locations across the world Freight rate management, supplier performance rating, and historical shipment record keeping.
The Finance Department also uses Files to assist with the company-wide business process documentation, required for Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance. Oracle Tutor is used to create process documentation across the company, and all global documentation is stored in Oracle Files. So far, the 14 global process owners in the Finance Department have authored more than 10,000 pages of business process documentation, which is managed exclusively in Oracle Files and available for employees to access via the company portal. The versioning, locking, and workflow capabilities of Oracle Files helped Oracle comply faster with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and improved internal controls and visibility into the company’s business processes. This visibility allows Oracle to effectively communicate with all employees and create a culture of compliance where everyone understands exactly where to find the latest business process documentation to ensure that the documented controls are actually in place.
Oracle Files is the foundation for a compliance architecture at Oracle, where all content eventually lives in one logical repository—an important area for any public company to address. Oracle Files: True Enterprise Content Management But these are just the first of many opportunities to leverage Oracle Files in every business process across the company. Today, Oracle Files delivers on the promise of knowledge management—a single source of truth that everyone can leverage and build upon. The dramatic process, collaboration, and compliance benefits that Oracle has seen is driven in part by quality improvements from managing all content from all employees.
Oracle Files offers a compelling vision for next-generation enterprise-wide content management systems. These systems must be low-cost, available on an open-source grid to reduce costs, and scalable across hundreds of thousands of users. As Oracle’s experience proves, the key to a successful rollout is leveraging how users work instead of forcing a change on them, allowing for an organic deployment with no major migrations.
Much of your company’s intellectual capital—which influences your success in the marketplace—lies in unstructured content. You already store your valuable structured data in a database. Isn’t it time to secure your other valuables as well?
Managing Content in the Database: Content Management Done Right January 2005 Authors: Rich Buchheim, Harald Collet Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA 94065 U.S.A. Worldwide Inquiries: Phone: +1.650.506.7000 Fax: +1.650.506.7200 www.oracle.com Copyright 2005, Oracle Corporation. All rights reserved. Oracle is a registered trademark, and Oracle Collaboration Suite and Oracle Files are trademarks or registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. This document is provided for information purposes only and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. Oracle Corporation does not warrant that this document is error free, nor does it provide any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Oracle Corporation specifically disclaims any liability with respect to this document and no contractual obligations are formed directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without the prior written permission of Oracle Corporation.