Content Management Services

All organizations have different types of data that they use on a regular basis in the course of their activities. Some of this data is in spreadsheets, some in Oracle databases, some in non-Oracle databases, some is in picture and sound files ”the list goes on and on. Content Management refers to the process of capturing, storing, sorting, codifying, integrating, updating, and protecting any and all of an organization s information. Oracle Application Server 10 g provides content management services that allow organizations to store, manage, and retrieve all different types of data in a central place; namely, an Oracle database.

Storing disparate data is not the only objective, however. For any content management service to be truly useful, it must also take into account such factors as connecting to other people s information, approval and publication processes, indexing, search and retrieval capabilities, security, collaboration, accessibility, reuse, and digital rights management. In Oracle9 i Application Server Release 1, Oracle introduced the Oracle Internet File System (iFS), which stored files in an Oracle 8 i Database or Oracle 9 i Database. iFS, in effect, made all content available in a file hierarchy that could be accessed through a web browser, Windows networking, or FTP, independent of platform (except for Windows networking, of course). Application Server 10 g has added many new features to its content management capabilities and renamed it the Oracle Content Management Software Development Kit (SDK). The Content Manager SDK has support for all major content management services listed above. Oracle Ultra Search can be used to search across corporate web servers, databases, mail servers, file servers, and Oracle 10 g Portal instances. Ultra Search is based on Oracle 10 g Text technology and is an out-of-the box solution that requires no SQL coding. It uses a crawler to index documents (the documents stay in their own repositories), and the crawled information is used to build an index that stays within your firewall in an Oracle database.