Building Content with back office data:

“As competition continues to grow via the e-economy and as customer/partner relationship management becomes more sophisticated, the need for organizations to leverage the wealth of information in documents, images and reports will increase.” (Meta Group, September 1999) “How effectively organizations deal with mission-critical information and expose it as usable content to support employees, partners and consumers is becoming a recognized differentiator.” (Meta Group, January 2001)

With 75% of information is in unstructured (nondatabase) format—documents, reports and images. Can you transform it into “usable content” to support your e-business initiatives? Inadequate integration is often a problem.

Vital information about customers, products and transactions produced by back-office systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) often isn’t available as Web content or at Web speed to employees, customers and suppliers.

The challenge is to manage, Web-enable and Web-present content in multiple formats from multiple sources.

Documents and reports required for presentation in customer-facing applications may be generated by ERP or other back-office applications, or may be converted from paper to electronic format by scanning. These documents will be of many different types—bills, statements, purchase orders, invoices, remittances, output reports, e-mail, policies, correspondence and more. And they will be in many different formats, including AFP, PostScript, PCL, PDF, text and others.

1. What is the source of the content?

2. What format are the documents in?

3. How to capture these documents and link them by shared values such as vendor number, account number, territory and product?

4. How to present the documents over the Web: HTML, XML, image?

To implement an effective solution to manage and present enterprise content.

Content management is the activities associated with making documents Web-ready, including capturing, indexing, integrating, transforming and displaying content. The robustness and flexibility will determine the success of implementation.

1) capture the documents, regardless of format, from the scanning system or from the applications that produce them.

2) store them in an integrated repository. This process indexes the documents, making them accessible based on key identifiers. A robust indexing capability will support multi-level, multi-key indexing to make retrieval easy and flexible. It will let you index and logically group documents, regardless of format, across time, across platforms, across storage devices and across applications.

3) Present web content means transforming it and displaying it in a Web browser. Different applications require different types of Web presentment. Flexible content presentment allows you to define what information should be extracted and where and how it should be presented. Automatic content presentment converts the entire document into a Web-ready format, e.g.HTML or SVG (scalable vector graphics). This form of presentment preserves the display characteristics of the original document and would be used, for example, to give a customer service representative a display that is an exact replica of the paper document, facilitating communication with the customer.