Document-Based Technology:

The Answer to Gaining Web Presence in “Internet Time”

By Ellen Rome

 

Today, businesses are spending substantial sums to custom build solutions to present corporate information to customers, vendors and employees via the Internet, Extranets, and Intranets.  The real challenge for IT departments rests in giving any authorized user, at any time, from any place, access to diverse types of corporate information – all from a single user interface – a Web browser.
 
Customers, vendors and employees want to be able to retrieve all of the information pertaining to a particular account, order or series of transactions, even if they originated on dissimilar systems.  IT is faced with a significant engineering challenge as they must provide a system that enables universal access to vast quantities of information by numerous corporate departments, each with a different need for information:
 
·        Customers and business partners want electronic “self-service” access to purchase orders, invoices, order status, pricing, inventory status and other transaction data statements seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.
·        Employees want fast, electronic availability of computer transaction and financial data worldwide - with view, print and e-mail capability.
·        Customer service management wants an immediate display of an exact replica of all of the callers’ statements/invoices/bills to eliminate call-backs and reduce “talk-time,” in addition to the ability to e-mail or fax copies to customers during the initial call.
·        Governmental and regulatory agencies as well as internal accounting and legal departments within the organization are mandating seven or more years of electronic access to historical data documents.
 
These diverse needs for information access present the IT department with an engineering paradox.  On the one hand, their systems must be designed to index and store vast quantities of historical transaction information.  On the other hand, these systems must provide concurrent access by thousands of users without degrading performance.
 
The Document side of the business already has time-tested, off-the-shelf technology that can meet this strategic mandate at lower cost, in “Internet” time, and without impact on the Y2K certification of the corporate systems that hold this data.  Unfortunately, IT departments aren’t looking at these technologies because they don’t know about them.  The best example is Enterprise Report Management (ERM).  ERM systems have been engineered from the beginning to be scalable for high-volume management of corporate information, while also handling the high-retrieval rates driven by Intranet and Extranet access.
 
Enterprise Report Management – An Off-The-Shelf Solution for Web Access to Corporate Information
 
Despite changing its name from COLD (which cast it as an archival storage solution), few organizations realize that this technology was conceived to solve the problem of universal corporate information access.  Originally, corporate information was distributed throughout the organization via paper reports.  As organizations became more geographically decentralized, the shortcomings of this method were quickly apparent.  Distributing reams of paper to hundreds of field offices was cumbersome, slow and expensive.  Computer Output to Microfiche (COM) arrived to solve these problems as its
physical compactness allowed the information to be distributed more cost-effectively.  Unfortunately, COM did not solve the problem of efficiently finding particular information within a report.  With COM, distribution was efficient, but retrieval was still cumbersome, slow and expensive.  Computer Output to Laser Disk (COLD) arrived on the scene to allow corporate information to be distributed and retrieved more cost-effectively.  COLD allowed information to be distributed electronically and retrieved via key field indexes.  The deployment of corporate networks expanded the distribution aspect across the enterprise.  Finally, the advent of Web-enabled COLD systems, now more appropriately named Enterprise Report Management systems, extends this distribution beyond the enterprise – to any authorized user, at any time, from any place. 
 
ERM systems are the most cost-effective way to make transaction reports, e-commerce documents, bills and statements available via the Internet, an Intranet or an Extranet.  This cost-efficiency comes from the fact that ERM systems leverage existing applications, are time-tested and present information through a user familiar interface.  ERM systems leverage the existing output of corporate IT systems – printed reports.  They therefore don’t require costly, time-consuming investments in data gathering applications.  The limited number of popular print formats (approximately four – line, AFP, Metacode, PCL) means that ERM systems have the unique ability to construct a common index that references the entire collection of corporate documents (letters, monthly statements, bills, transaction reports).  Simply put, if you can print it, you can: index it, search it, retrieve it - all via the Internet.  Additionally, that same information can then be distributed to customers, vendors and employees via email, fax or URL.  The second factor in ERM’s cost efficiency is the fact that this software is off-the-shelf and time-tested – COLD systems date back over a decade.  These systems are not “Revision 1.0” software.  They have been architected for performance and ease-of-use and fine- tuned through several generations.  Finally, Enterprise Report Management systems provide the perfect metaphor for presenting information over the Internet in a format that people are familiar with – an exact replica of the paper it was printed on.  Training costs for internal users and customer support costs for external users are minimal – everyone understands how to read information when it is presented in a familiar format.
 
Security is the Key
Enabling universal access to information is only half of the challenge however.  Assuring that only authorized users will actually be able to retrieve the information is critical.  ERM systems afford several layers of security.  At the highest level, corporate databases are protected from outside access through physical security.  ERM systems are typically configured as a separate server with their own archive store of compressed corporate reports.  Internet users therefore, do not directly access corporate databases.  At the second level, within the ERM system itself, access to specific reports is controlled at the group, user and individual document level by leveraging the logon and file security mechanisms of the underlying operating system.  Specific users or groups of users are given access to certain classes of documents. Typically a single document will contain statements, invoices or order status from several, if not all, of the customers of the company.  Access control at the document level, as provided by the operating system, is therefore insufficient to protect sensitive customer specific information.  Users must be limited to seeing only those pages of information contained within a file, which are relevant to them.   Through a concept known as subset security, ERM systems provide the ability to “logically burst” a report file.  A user only “sees” those pages of the report they are authorized to view.  In the case of customer self-service, this could be utilized to allow customers to view their own statements, but not those of others, even though all statements are contained in a single file within the ERM system.
 
Going one step further, ERM systems provide a “bookmark” feature to assure that report information is protected even when inadvertently distributed to the wrong person.  Rather than distribute a viewable page or pages of information, the system sends a “reference” to the specific pages within a report.   To access the actual information, the employee, customer or business partner invokes the reference, which takes them back through the ERM security system, revalidating their credentials to view the referenced pages.  If the validation succeeds, they are then able to retrieve the referenced pages.  This “page-level” security is generally tied to an existing corporate security database eliminating the need to maintain two security files.

 


Features of an Effective Enterprise Report Management System
There are a number of features that an ERM system should have to allow it to be used to Internet-enable corporate information:
 
Retrieval
·        “Off-the-shelf” Web retrieval client, supported by both Internet Explorer and Netscape.
·        Web client source code should be available and modifiable to allow for “integration” of report retrieval into other corporate portal applications.
·        Allow any document to be retrieved, viewed, printed, faxed or e-mailed via Web client.
·        Retrieval via a range of search capabilities including key field, full-text search and Boolean column search.
·        Retrieval across document types to allow all statements, bills, credit memos, electronic applications and related report data to be available by customer number or other account identifier.
·        “Forms overlay” capability to let users view and print an exact replica of documents which originally were printed on preprinted forms.
·        Ability to add annotations to documents to facilitate internal communication.
 
Architecture
·        Capacity to store and index millions of documents.
·        Accept, index and store data from all of the company’s disparate computer systems.  Line data, IBM/AFP and Xerox/Metacode print formats must be simultaneously supported.
·         “Page-oriented” for efficient network retrieval, printing and transmission of documents, particularly for lengthy transaction reports.  One to “n” pages must be able to be selected, transmitted, viewed or printed.
·        Security at the document and page level to control access to documents.
·        Ability to utilize existing corporate security databases to control access to pages.
·        Ability to distribute access to documents by reference (i.e. bookmarks)
·        Extendable through an Application Programming Interface (API)
·        Administration module with individual user statistics (logon and logoff time, documents accessed by user, etc.) for audit and/or billing purposes.
 
The Benefits
Worldwide access to computer transaction data, bills, statements and other output documents regardless of their origination point or system, by any authorized user, at any time is enabled by an Enterprise Report Management System without major disruptions to existing IT infrastructure. With Enterprise Report Management, if you can print it, you can: index it, search it, retrieve it - all with access control and security and you can distribute it to customers, vendors, and employees via email, fax or Web access.  The return on investment in this technology is frequently less than twelve months. 
 
Beyond the Web access discussed in this article, industrial-grade Enterprise Report Management systems can also address a wide range of other Information Technology problems including Integration of multiple applications across dissimilar computer systems, linking customer and supplier data, and business intelligence in the form of “report” mining.  Perhaps the greatest significance of deploying ERM to provide “universal” access to all corporate information is the foundation it forms on which to build a company’s Document Management Portal.
 
Ellen Rome is Vice President of COLD/ERM for Eastman Software. She may be reached at 978-313-7286, ellen.rome@eastmansoftware.com.