EMC, Adobe to Align Content Management

EMC isn’t the first company that comes to mind when the topic of enterprise
content management (ECM) pops up, not in a world peppered by independent ECM
players like Interwoven and FileNet .

But perhaps it should be.

EMC, which entered the ECM market when it acquired
Documentum almost two years ago, has just inked an agreement with document
software maker Adobe Systems to develop a content
management infrastructure based on standards.

The Hopkinton, Mass., information systems vendor said the new infrastructure
will combine EMC’s Documentum platform and Adobe’s open Extensible Metadata
Platform (XMP) technology to improve the way computer users share and manage
information.

How the ECM platform works with Adobe XMP is a bit more complicated.

First, XMP is a labeling technology that can embed data about a content
file, or metadata, into the file itself, enabling better processing of
jobs, workflow automation and rights management.

With XMP, metadata can be assigned to content earlier in the information
lifecycle and prior to it being stored in the EMC Documentum repository,
enabling users to automate the tagging and validation of content more
effectively.

Together, EMC’s Documentum platform and XMP facilitate information sharing
and management across different repositories.

Enterprise content management standards are important for accommodating the
growing glut of structured
Data like XML, or unstructured data, such as e-mail and X-ray files.

While the state of computing is evolving to the point where innovative
products can’t fly off the shelves, vendors have put out too many
proprietary products over the last few years.

The innovation is great. But the problem is that most hardware or software
won’t work with similar products from vendors who seek to best each other
for a bigger chunk of the market.

In ECM specifically, content created and shelved in one repository generally
can’t be exchanged with content from another vendor’s repository. This
becomes a major headache for business customers that want to be able to
integrate
content into business processes.

That’s why the collaborative effort between EMC and Adobe will also support
the Interoperable Enterprise Content Management (iECM) standard being
developed by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM).

The iECM framework will address the need for a common integration layer
between different enterprise content management systems and multiple
business applications. The framework will include a suite of Web services
that provide a common set of operations through which ECM solutions and
enterprise applications can interoperate and manage content.

On that note, iECM will also support key standards such as SOAP
, WSDL and BPEL , among others.