As clients are preparing for 2020, TSG has seen an uptick in the number of requests for OpenMigrate support for migrating from legacy repositories (FileNet, ImagePlus, Mobius, CMOD…..) to a new modern ECM 2.0 repository. TSG will typically recommend a "one step" migration where OpenMigrate can both retrieve documents from the legacy repository and store the document and metadata in the new repository. This approach provides many advantages a “two-step” approach where documents and ... [Continue Reading]
Reference Architecture for Content Management on Azure HDInsight with HBase
TSG has recently been working with a multiple clients that are deciding on whether to deploy their Content Management platform in the Azure cloud from Microsoft or on premise. The discussion typically boils down to "how much would it cost for me to deploy this in the cloud vs procuring hardware and software licenses for an on premise deployment?" This post will provide a reference architecture and sizing estimate to help understand the various components and their relative costs to procure, ... [Continue Reading]
ECM 2.0 – Can you build it yourself?
Recently Gartner Analyst and long-time ECM evangelist Marko Sillapaa posted an interesting article titled “Why Build a Content Services Platform from Scratch?” . In the article Marko correctly points out that "build your own" isn’t easy and it's better to avoid home grown solutions where support could be required for 20 years. An alternative viewpoint comes from another long-time ECM evangelist Jeff Pots, “ECM, You Ain’t Gonna Need it” where Jeff points out how his firm has built light-weight ... [Continue Reading]
DynamoDB – 11 Billion Document Benchmark White Paper
In May of 2019, Technology Services Group initiated an 11 Billion Document DynamoDB benchmark, which was completed in June 2019. With the success of the benchmark, TSG was able to successfully demonstrate that AWS, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch and our OpenContent, OpenAnnotate and OpenMigrate products could scale to an unprecedented level and represented the next evolution of enterprise content management, a Big-Data, NoSQL approach for the multi-billion object repository. This white paper will ... [Continue Reading]
ECM Large Repositories – Volume Testing With the TSG Test Harness
One of the more interesting achievements of the TSG 11 Billion Document benchmark was our ability to quickly load a large repository and test performance for search and retrieval performance as well as concurrent usage. For those clients considering developing a large repository of documents, TSG now has both the experience as well as additional tools to help conduct a significant volume test at scale in a very short timeframe. This post will describe how our tools can be leveraged for large ... [Continue Reading]
DynamoDB and Hadoop/HBase as a Document Store – How Key Design can be used to reduce index requirements
TSG continues to have success with Hadoop/HBase and DynamoDB as alternatives to legacy ECM platforms that rely on relational databases. As more clients adopt modern NoSQL platforms for ECM, we are seeing additional and interesting benefits from NoSQL/Key-Value database. This post will highlight the 'key' design in these Key-Value databases to allow for massively scalable content management on HBase and DynamoDB for billions of documents and millisecond retrieval times. ... [Continue Reading]
The Deep Analysis Podcast – The 11 Billion File Benchmark
Dave Giordano, CEO of TSG, recently sat down with Alan Pelz-Sharpe to discuss our recent 11 Billion File Benchmark on AWS and DynamoDB. Additionally, hear Dave's thoughts on the future of ECM and why companies are considering alternatives to the traditional ECM Suite. ... [Continue Reading]
DynamoDB and AWS – How to build your own ECM capabilities for massive scale and performance
After the successful 11 Billion Document Benchmark with DynamoDB, we had a discussion with a couple of the major analysts as well as a nice shout-out from Jeff Potts on ECM Architect. We received a ton of great feedback on the scale of what we were able to accomplish along with lots of discussion specifically on how we built it and sharing some lessons learned. This post will break down the components of our NoSQL (DynamoDB and Hadoop) ECM components with background and comparison to ... [Continue Reading]
A Big Data Approach to ECM – White Paper from Deep Analysis
TSG recently participated in a research effort with Deep Analysis. The fundamental undertaking was to understand what alternatives innovative customers are considering when it comes to moving from Legacy ECM 1.0 to modern ECM 2.0 capabilities on premise or in the cloud. Alan Pelz-Sharpe and the analysts of Deep Analysis conducted a deep dive into Big Data and particularly NoSQL databases, Hadoop and DynamoDB. ... [Continue Reading]
ECM 2.0 – What does it mean?
Great whitepaper available at Deep Analysis from long-time ECM analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe entitled “Intelligent Information Management – From ECM 1.0 to 2.0”. This post will highlight the relevant points and add our thoughts. ECM 2.0 – What are the opportunities? We would agree with Alan that, while repository centric ECM 1.0 systems dominate the market, 2.0 opportunities exist to offer more insight, automation and decentralization. Combined with new technology from cloud ... [Continue Reading]
DynamoDB and Hadoop – Why Big Data will disrupt Document Management
Back in the 80’s, the emergence and low cost of PC’s, network and relational databases combined to create the beginnings of modern image management systems. Solutions and approaches gradually evolved to include documents and the creation of the ECM (enterprise content management/document management) industry. Back in 2015, TSG began brainstorming about what’s next for the document management industry. In addition to cloud computing already disrupting the data center for ... [Continue Reading]
Adobe Acrobat Alternative – Doing more with just a web browser
Many users rely on PDF viewing, annotation, and manipulation tools when working with documents, especially in case management scenarios such as policy and claim document management within the Insurance industry. In many of these systems, users are forced to download PDFs to the local machine in order to work with the document within Adobe Acrobat. However, with modern browser technologies, it is possible to streamline this process by doing more in the web browser, side-stepping the need to ... [Continue Reading]
DynamoDB and Hadoop / HBase – What are some of the differences?
As an Amazon Web Services Partner, TSG has begun developing out our document management solution for DynamoDB, we have been surprised with some of the implementation differences between DynamoDB and Hadoop / HBase. This post will dive into the differences in building we have encountered some examples while building out our ECM/Content Process Services solution. ... [Continue Reading]
Redaction for AWS, Alfresco, Documentum and Hadoop – Bulk Redaction upon Ingestion or Migration
As we presented in our Redaction Roadmap earlier this year, one of our product development additions to OpenMigrate this quarter is the ability to bulk redact incoming documents as part of an ingestion or migration into Alfresco, Documentum, AWS, or Hadoop. As detailed earlier in our Redacting Roadmap, both OpenMigrate and the OpenContent Management Suite will have capabilities surrounding the redaction of specific values. This post will focus on demonstrating how OpenMigrate can be used to ... [Continue Reading]
Case Analytics for Insurance
As our clients add more and more capabilities to OpenContent Case, one of our big new exciting developments will be the ability to extract proactive insight into the documents themselves based client definition of critical terms. This post will describe and present our initial solution for proactively identifying key terms for a case with a medical claim folder example. This post will also present our case analytic roadmap for adding additional analytics capabilities, including date ... [Continue Reading]
Redaction for AWS, Alfresco, Documentum and Hadoop – Folder Case Redaction
One of our product development additions to the OpenContent Case this quarter is adding the folder bulk redact action for all documents within the folder with either Alfresco, Documentum, AWS or Hadoop. As detailed earlier in our Redacting Roadmap, both OpenMigrate and the OpenContent Management Suite will have capabilities surrounding the redaction of specific values. This post will focus on demonstrating how OpenContent Case can be used to redact content, particularly focused on a case ... [Continue Reading]
Redacting Roadmap – User Scenarios
As part of the TSG Product Roadmap and based on clients requests, we are currently in the midst of adding additional redaction capabilities across our product set. This post will discuss the different user redaction scenarios and how our products (OpenAnnotate, OpenMigrate and the OpenContent Search and Case) are being updated to satisfy these requests. These capabilities are being added for Alfresco, Documentum, Hadoop and potentially Amazon DynamoDB as supported repositories. Other ... [Continue Reading]
Alan Pelz-Sharpe – Deep Analysis Review of Technology Services Group
At the beginning of 2018, TSG hired Alan Pelz-Sharpe of Deep Analysis to conduct a review of TSG’s products and services. Alan both visited the TSG office as well as interviewed multiple customers and partners to better understand TSG’s offerings. This post will present his findings. ... [Continue Reading]
OpenContent Solr Services – New TSG Product Offering
As part of our campaign to make Documentum better, TSG is announcing the formalization of our OpenContent Solr Services as well as some new features that we are adding to our work with Solr. We have been working with Lucene and later Solr for over 12 years but have recently discovered several client scenarios and opportunities that are driving our expansion of our Solr capabilities for Documentum, Alfresco, Hadoop and other repositories. This post will detail the different scenarios as well as ... [Continue Reading]
2018 Thoughts and Predictions as well as recap of 2017 postings
2017 was the busiest year ever for the TSG blog. Whether it was the finalization of the purchase of Documentum by OpenText or Gartner’s 180 on IBM, we had our most active year with over 60,000 views of our different articles. This post will highlight some of the most popular articles as well as our predictions for 2018. ... [Continue Reading]
Suggested Redactions for Documentum, Alfresco or Hadoop using OpenRedact
We have recently seen many of our insurance clients asking what they can do about any PII (Personally identifiable information) and PHI (Protected Health information) that is in the documents they receive from various sources in their ECM repositories. TSG released OpenRedact as a product to help solve this problem by allowing users to manually redact portions of the document to hide some of this sensitive information. This post is going to outline the newest enhancement to OpenRedact to allow ... [Continue Reading]
Data Visualization Dashboard for ECM Migrations
Large Enterprise Content Management migrations tend to be mission critical projects for many companies. The lead up to a migration can be fairly easy to convey status to all interested parties. However, once the migration begins, many clients need the ability to inform interested stakeholders of the overall progress on-demand. Until now, this would require a developer or analyst to take time to analyze logs and manually perform calculations. With the OpenMigrate dashboard, both the developers ... [Continue Reading]
Documentum, Alfresco or Hadoop – How to get more out of your Object Store
TSG conducted our annual client briefing on Monday June 5th. One of the more interesting presentations and discussions was on how clients are finding innovative ways to leverage the capabilities of the various object storage devices and technologies. This post will present some of our experiences and best practices in regards to object storage and ECM. ... [Continue Reading]
Top 3 Reasons to Publish Content out of an ECM
Last month, we discussed what a consumer portal is and the benefits of using one. We also considered how to make the switch to using a consumer portal. First, let's recap. A consumer portal is a read-only interface, separate from the ECM, that allows content to be accessible to a large audience at low cost. They are ideal for situations where there is a low number of content publishers, but a large number of content consumers. Here are our top three reasons to publish content out of an ECM ... [Continue Reading]
Import Email Messages from GMail into your ECM Repository with HPI
We've seen many clients with requirements around importing emails into an ECM repository. For a long time, we've allowed ingesting outlook MSG emails in our HPI interface. To see how this works, check out this demo in the TSG Learning Zone. However, we've recently worked with some clients that have migrated to Gmail and Google Apps for Business that would like similar functionality. ... [Continue Reading]