Case Study – Informa
Informa – Modern Document Management for Publishing
Informa plc is a leading international provider of specialist information and services for the academic, professional and business communities. Their publishing and training products are founded on high value content which is generated in a wide variety of subject areas. These range from:
- Arts and Humanities
- Social Sciences
- Physical Science and Technology
- Finance and Law
- Commercial - Telecommunications, Maritime Trade, Energy, Commodities, Agriculture and Food
Informa has over 150 offices in 40 countries and employs almost 7,000 staff with major centers in the UK and the USA and global sales in excess of 1.4bn.
Re-purposing and management of content across many channels is critical in the modern publishing world. Informa has to deliver information in a wide range of formats, both traditional and electronic. Being media neutral is the key to enabling new product ideas quickly and economically to meet customer demands or take advantage of new business opportunities.
Enterprise Content Management, integrating both document management and web publishing, has taken on an increasingly important role in business development in recent years. Some of these requirements are new, reflecting changes to the core business while some are currently managed through the use of in-house systems that require human intervention to copy or move content between systems.
“We realized early on that the costs associated with the implementation of a traditional content management solution across the enterprise would be difficult to justify to our executive board”
Creating a Lifecycle for Documents and Re-purposing Content
One of the key aims of the project is to provide a platform that users can, in their native editor, easily create and participate in an auditable, controlled document lifecycle – for example author, review, approve and distribute. The document flows, transformations and rules must be simple to configure and XSL-FO support was desired. The document management system needed to be open and support modern standards such as Web Services, JSR-168, and JSR-170 so that Informa could leverage 3rd party, standard-based tools while not getting tied in to a proprietary system
Alfresco - As Simple as a Shared Drive
Ease-of-use was identified as a primary concern within the project. Users must be able to collaborate using, for example, their standard Word processing package. Within this, they could enter details about the document/Meta-Data which Alfresco could then automatically extract and enter into the repository. This way, users would not be required to learn how to set attributes for each system they use. The Alfresco repository was made to be as simple to use as a shared “Z: drive”. Where necessary, portal users will be able to work in their native portal through support for the JSR-168 portlet standard. A simple to configure Aspect-Oriented system will be used where rules are defined to fire actions. This makes it easy to define document lifecycles, content transformations and versioning models. Future releases of the application will be capable of delivering high quality print as well as Web-ready files by leveraging Alfresco’s XSL-FO support via open standards.
The Benefits of Using Alfresco
- Simple Installation
- Ease-of-Use – Native Application and Intelligent Virtual File System
- Full Document Lifecycle Management – Auditing, Version Control and Release Management
- Significantly Reduced Cost
- Able to Retire Legacy Systems
- No Proprietary Tie-In
“Alfresco’s business model and open standards approach provides my company the flexibility to bring to bear the most appropriate solutions for our business without regard to proprietary software suites and their associated costs.”
Why Informa Chose Alfresco
Informa chose Alfresco for the pedigree of their people – 15 years of experience including the co-founder of Documentum® and Documentum’s Java Web Toolkit and Portal team. Through the use of modern technology this team was able to produce an offering at a significantly lower cost than traditional Enterprise Content Management vendors. The use of standards and the open source approach delivered a solution that was open – allowing Informa to easily integrate other products and not be tied in to any single proprietary vendor. In short Alfresco delivered by far the best value of any ECM product.