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EMC Corp. on Monday announced the availability of its new Documentum Enterprise Content Integration (ECI) Services, enabling end-users to expand the discovery and management of content from internal and external data sources.
ECI is EMCs rebranded version of the askOnce technology and business unit, which Documentum acquired from Xerox Corp. in March. EMC has infused new cross-lingual search capabilities, content extraction and adapter building tools into the rearchitected software product, said officials at Documentum, a business unit of Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC.
Documentum ECI can discover, access and assimilate global structured and unstructured content via a single query from repositories outside of Documentums products. For instance, ECI can sift through internal applications including IBM Lotus Notes, Oracle Corp. databases, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Index Server.
The product also features adapters to pool data and information from other content management systems other than Documentums, plus extraction technology to quickly peruse through data sets that are most relevant. Adapters translate the query into the API or language that a particular source requires. Queries can be set to a policy schedule or by triggers, such as when content from a competitors Web site is altered.
The content management tool features a customizable, SSO (single sign-on) interface that brokers out a query to several heterogeneous sources, from enterprise applications, groupware and public and proprietary databases to Internet sources such as Web search engines, Web sites, local archives, government portals and industry-specific data repositories.
Charlie Sodano, a Documentum end-user, is manager of information services at Montvale, N.J.-based Berlex Laboratories, a division of Berlex Inc., which is a U.S. affiliate of Germany-based Schering AG. Sodano said he plans on evaluating ECI to see firsthand whether the product can significantly reduce time and the costs of research he conducts for his organization.
“Right now, when we want to find information and search for it, we have to go to several different repositories,” he said. “We have to do a lot of analysis before we commit money to research, and even that is laborious to analyze that completely.”
“We subscribe to all of the big database services. That costs us big bucks to do, and all those have to be done individually and one at a time because there isnt a common interface to all of them.”
Sodano said ECI could help his organization realize its desire to make its Lotus Notes and Documentum pharmaceutical information library global intranet—which was launched three years ago—as a prime data source to be managed as a multilingual subscription-based service, from which people could pull vast amounts of information.
The Documentum ECI software can be used in conjunction with the Documentum Enterprise Content Management platform, with other content management products or as a standalone offering, Documentum officials said. ESI runs on Microsoft Windows servers, with Linux support expected before the end of the year, Documentum officials said.
