A Pragmatic Strategy for Oracle Enterprise Content Management

Brian "Bex" Huff and Andy MacMillan delivered a session called "A Pragmatic Strategy for Oracle ECM" which pushed some of the integration and cooperative concepts that have been pervasive among the keynotes and sessions today. They describe their approach to content management as more realistic than the message presented by many vendors as "Hey, we will do it all". Their approach is also more tolerant of your existing content repositories and your investment in those elements.

They describe a situation where a client has several existing content repositories. Some of these can be consolidated into your new strategic content management repository. Some of them cannot. This can be due to technical issues or the fact that you have spent a lot of money on those repositories and/or users are entrenched in using that repository already. These previously existing repositories that perhaps service tremendous load or importance but are not capable or selected as the strategic repository are termed tactical repositories.

The session then moved on to discuss federated software solutions to help control and integrate your existing, tactical repositories with the feature set of your new strategic enterprise wide solution. Examples of these federated software applications included Secure Enterprise Search and Information Rights Management.

Additionally, these two guys are writing a book together, potentially entitled "Transform Infoglut: A Pragmatic Strategy for Oracle Enterprise Content Management" and it will hopefully be delivered sometime around January 2009.