On the Hotline
The Three C's of The Enterprise:
Collaboration, Compliance, and Content
By: Ron Zapar, CEO Re-Quest, Inc.

It used to be that all any company had to worry about was dealing with its structured data. However, these days, the management of structured data such as financials, customer profiles, purchase orders, etc., is governed by data policies and supporting business applications that have been refined over the years. Today, with the proliferation of email and instant messaging as commonplace productivity tools, along with the strict internal control and information retention requirements brought to bear on companies by compliance rulings such as Sarbanes-Oxley, a company's biggest worry is not how to manage their structured data but rather how to control their unstructured data. From digital asset and document management to communication and collaboration data, to keeping a record of who does what to their sensitive information, companies today have a huge burden on their hands in maintaining their unstructured data. And to be candid, there are not many all-encompassing solutions available that help companies deal with all types of unstructured information from many different sources. Fortunately, however, Oracle Corp. has made a significant investment within their Fusion Middleware platform to provide customers with the power and flexibility to effectively communicate and collaborate, as well as secure and manage the explosion of unstructured data in the Enterprise.

Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g (“OCS 10g”) offers customers a suite of enterprise-class real-time collaboration, communication, and content management applications that enable organizations to increase user productivity and service levels while reducing total cost of ownership. It can be purchased as a complete suite, or any of the following three packages can be purchased individually: Oracle Content Services, Oracle Real Time Collaboration, and Oracle Unified Messaging. OCS 10g not only offers Best of Breed solutions in each one of these areas, but it also provides a built-in data management layer that captures all content generated within the applications into an Oracle 10g Database. Emails, Instant Messages, Documents and Web Conference information created in OCS 10g live inside an Oracle 10g information store. The Infrastructure Tier of OCS 10g also provides an LDAP based security model that maintains its structure in a 10g database. Only delegated individuals have access to information owned by others in the Enterprise, but all communications, document changes, approvals and the like are available for compliance purposes.

In addition to OCS 10g, Oracle Corp. also offers a set of products that focus on providing solutions for managing various types of content that exists in the Enterprise . Oracle Universal Content Management 10g is a portfolio of industry-leading solutions that delivers a new level of integration and productivity across the entire spectrum of unstructured content. Oracle Universal Content Management is comprised of seven solutions ranging from document management to Web content management:

• Web Content Management
• Enterprise Content Management
• Universal Records Management
• Imaging and Process Management
• Information Rights Management
• Digital Asset Management
• Document Management

With this suite of applications and their associated requirement of storing and maintaining unstructured data in secure and scalable Oracle 10g databases, a company's ability to adhere to compliance requirements of internally controlling who creates, updates, approves and deletes critical information increase dramatically over conventional network file server storage. In addition, Universal Content Management 10g provides a unified platform to manage all types of unstructured data, as opposed to silo solutions that only provide for example Document Management or Web Content Management functionality.

OCS 10g and Oracle Universal Content Management 10g are both part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware platform, so integrating to and managing Oracle and non-Oracle sources of content is easily accomplished, and scaling to meet the needs of even the largest companies is achievable with the inherent Grid architecture. Together with the integrated workflow engine, the OCS 10g and Universal Content Management 10g components of the Oracle Fusion Middleware platform provide enablement of the Three C's with powerful applications that sit on top of the World's Best Database and Application Server infrastructure.

If you are interested in hearing more about Oracle's Universal Content Management 10g and Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g solutions, please feel free to send an email to info@re-questinc.com to have a Re-Quest representative contact you.