Enterprise content is the currency that moves businesses. And logically, its management is often the key to a business’s success or failure. The very purpose of ECM is managing enterprise content in a way that it stimulates insights and decisions that drive corporate activities.
ECM Modernization Avoidance
Employees want to be productive anytime, anywhere, from any device or application. Enterprises want to find and share business documents just as easily as they can browse and buy a book online. It’s all about content management technologies that support remote and collaborative working styles.
The problem is that enterprises fear modern ECM. In fact, most enterprises fear IT modernization in general. The reasons for this are understandable.
Enterprises are afraid of high costs, loss of content through migration, and rejection by users of the new technology. All these fears are real.
The real reason for failure is the idea that the team would leave one well-known system and replace it with a completely new one that comes with a steep learning curve.
You don’t have to do all of this. In fact, you don’t have to do any of this.
You can take another path, another approach.
Modularity: The New Paradigm of ECM Modernization
Integration can avoid the pitfalls of modernizing front-end ECM.
Instead of risky migration, high costs, and confused employees, you can just integrate a modern front-end ECM to your existing back-end ECM software.
Interesting, right?
This approach is getting very popular in the last few years. Large companies that don’t want to risk the safety of their content and money, but do want to upgrade their legacy ECM software, very often employ this solution.
Changing the approach and going with the integration of a new front-end ECM to your legacy back-end ECM can be beneficial in many ways. Not only in terms of security and money, but this approach will solve all of your ‘outdated ECM problems’.
According to a Forrester survey, only 7% of the organizations surveyed have migrated all their content to a new ECM system. The majority of surveyed organizations retain some or most content in their old systems.
This survey indicates that almost 90% of organizations that modernized their ECM adopted this modular approach.
Of course, modernizing your outdated ECM system has to be more than just an abstract goal. It needs to result in improved business outcomes.
Updating your infrastructure to take advantage of the benefits of a more modern cloud-based structure requires a content integration platform – and one that is flexible enough to evolve over time.
We’ve had a lot of positive experiences in doing such a modular ECM Modernization strategy with ArkCase.
Transforming Legacy ECM With ArkCase as Front-End ECM
ArkCase offers an adaptive case management platform that is dynamic to support your business solutions. At the convergence of CRM, ECM, and BPM, ArkCase can help your enterprise reduce the complexity and unpredictability of your organization.
The ArkCase front-end ECM will replace your outdated ECM interface with a customizable interface that is easy to work with and organize. The modern features this solution offers can make all the difference for large businesses.
The ArkCase front-end ECM can easily integrate with almost any back-end ECM system on the market including:
Documentum
calvaDriv,
eX,
dotCMS
OpenText,
Fabasoft
Alfresco
Apache Chemistry
CEYONIQ
IBM
FileNet
IBM SmartCloud
LogicalDOC
Magnolia
SharePoint
NemakiWare
Nuxeo
O3Spaces
OpenCMS
OpenKM
OpenWGA
Oracle
SAP
Ptc
StarStorage
Laserfiche.
This unique capability makes ArkCase an excellent frontend ECM solution for your existing ECM backend system. It also provides:
Fast searchability of documents
Metadata strategies included
Customization of workflows
Document clustering
Data extraction, etc.
With ArkCase integration, you will get all the benefits of modern front-end ECM software without the need for full-fledged data migration, making the ECM modernization process much cheaper, safer, and faster.
“ArkCase software, which helps companies do more with less really appeals to our business units,” says Ian Rushton, Senior Vice President of Sharecare.
“Companies want to manage cases, search across their enterprise, and keep their existing systems, but don’t want to use or integrate 10 different tools.”
If you want to achieve the same, ArkCase is the right front-end ECM solution for you.
To Sum Up
Those 90% enterprises who took the survey already know that modernization helps in becoming faster and smarter in day-to-day operations, decision making, and delivery. Companies that fail to modernize risk falling behind their market competitors.
While some early adopters spent a lot of resources on ECM modernization, the more cautious majority can benefit from all the lessons learned and move on with modular ECM modernization. This way, they benefit from a more established set of procedures and experiences, adding up to a safer, faster, cheaper modernization process.
Integrate your existing backend ECM system with ArkCase modern front-end ECM and you will enjoy the benefits of a modern ECM system. No security risks. No migration. Just an integration. In fact, almost 90% of organizations that modernized their ECM did exactly that.
They both elaborate on ECM modernization, back-end and front-end integration, and all of the benefits that a platform like ArkCase can bring to your organization.
If you want to find out more about this subject, please feel free to take a look at them.
And if you have any questions or thoughts, do not hesitate to contact us.
Did you know that the industry standard for manually transcribing 1 hour of clear audio is 4 hours? That is a 4 to 1 ratio. Poor audio could take as much as 9 hours to transcribe 1 hour (9 to 1 ratio), which means a lot of manual hours are needed to transcribe audio and video files. Think about how much Society relies on audio and video files these days. Recently, we were asked to help solve this challenge by a law enforcement agency. This agency was spending about 8 hours for every 1 hour (8 to 1) of body camera or interview audio or video. Our solution – ArkCase, Alfresco, and AWS – originally proposed for their IT Modernization project addressed this challenge. Intrigued, they asked for a demo. With a clear understanding of the opportunity to further demonstrate value, we asked for a few weeks to prepare the demo.
Before We Get to the How, Let’s Describe the What
What are the platforms being used in this solution?
For starters, ArkCase is a low-code IT modernization or case management platform. ArkCase aims to be the premier open source low-code case management platform.
Alfresco is the leading open source enterprise content management platform providing core document management, business process management and records management services.
AWS is the leading cloud-based platform as a service (PaaS) supporting our ability to comply with FedRAMP, CJIS, HIPAA, HiTECH, SOC2 and other security controls.
ArkCase provides an intuitive, accessible and responsive user interface to view, stream, and transcribe rich media files. ArkCase integrates with AWS Transcribe service to provide high volume, high quality and cost-effective transcription of audio and video files. The transcription functionality in ArkCase allows users to upload audio and video files within ArkCase and configure whether files are automatically transcribed or manually sent to be transcribed allowing organizations to control their costs. ArkCase then uses an Alfresco Activiti workflow to process the files using AWS automatic speech recognition (ASR) service, which will produce the transcription files. The outcome of the process is a highly visual transcription with close caption and that can be searched and edited for enrichment. In addition, the transcription can be compiled into a Microsoft Word document from sharing. The user interface allows for streaming the rich media file while viewing the transcription text. This is extremely helpful when manually QAing the transcription text.
What Does ArkCase Transcription Functionality Provide?
The ArkCase user can perform many different actions on the transcribed file:
Viewing of the File Details
Language
Total Word Count
Confidence Rating of the Transcribed File
Transcription Status (In Process, Complete)
Listen or View to File in a Streaming Viewer with Close Caption
Searching for text within audio or video files
Jumping to that section of the audio or video
Tagging the file based on the transcription
Viewing Individual Sections of the Transcription Text
Each Transcription Text Section Shows:
Start Time of that Section of Text
Confidence Rating of that Section of Text
Editing Individual Sections of Transcription Text during QA
Automatically Compile the Transcription Text into a Single Document File
Can ArkCase Transcription Functionality be Configured?
ArkCase transcription functionality also provides administration configurations for certain transcribe options within the ArkCase application:
Enable Transcription to turn on transcription
Automatic or Manual Transcription to decide if you want all rich media files processed or to manually select the files you want to be processed
Word Count per transcribed section for chunking and readability
Confidence Threshold for highlighting sections that may need human reviewing
An Administrator can control the transcription functionality for all users in the ArkCase application, by enabling or disabling the functionality. If the functionality is enabled, the rich media files can be sent to AWS for transcription manually or automatically. If the Admin selects to enable automatic transcription, then each rich media file that is uploaded into ArkCase will be automatically sent to the Amazon Transcribe service. The Admin can also control the word count and confidence threshold for each section of transcription text. ArkCase will flag any sections of transcription text that do not meet the configured confidence threshold.
ArkCase transcription can support many different use cases, no matter your specific business. If you want to gain efficiencies and get more value from your audio and video content, let’s talk.
Conclusion
In recent years, multimedia content is more used than ever. This means that the world data trapped in multimedia formats becomes larger and more difficult to use. To help you solve this problem and use multimedia content to your advantage we made this integration of ArkCase, Alfresco, and AWS.
ArkCase, Alfresco, and AWS created a platform that can help enterprises derive value from the ever-increasing multimedia content. Thanks to this integration, enterprises of all sizes can now use Armedia Legal Module and Amazon Transcribe as part of it.
Armedia Legal Module turns any audio or video file into a text format which can later be used as any other textual document. No more external transcription services. No more waiting. No more time wasted.
In the Case Management world, automation is not an unknown word. On the contrary, in Case Management, automation and digitalization have been a hot topic for the last few decades.
From classification to automated workflows, automation has been present in the world of large organizations. But, the one thing that has always been a problem in Case Management, and unfortunately, still seems to bother large organizations is paper-based documents.
In today’s world of Case Management where data access, security, and efficiency are crucial, many large organizations realize the importance of deriving value from data TRAPPED in paper-based documents.
According to a report by Wise, 4 out of 5 organizations say that they are trying to cut down the use of paper. Nearly a third of them place larger orders of paper than they did 5 years ago. And only 18 percent of organizations declare themselves as entirely paperless.
Numbers that won’t put a smile on any faces outside the paper production industry.
Let’s dig a bit deeper into this matter and see why paper-based documents are such a problem in the world of Case Management and how organizations can make things better.
The Case Management Problem With Paper Documents
While paper itself is not that expensive, the costs of managing paper documents could be as much as 31 times the cost of buying it.
In 2015, Corp Magazine reported that in the United States, organizations spend on average 8 billion dollars annually on managing paper. The report explains that organizations spend an average of $20 to file a document, $120 to find a misplaced document and $220 to reproduce a lost document.
CMSWire found out that 47% of employees believe that the strongest thing preventing organizations from becoming entirely paperless is the lack of paper management.
The very nature of paper documents does not allow for large organizations to appropriately manage, access, and search through them. Reports mention a PricewaterhouseCoopers finding, that employees spend up to 50% of their time searching for information amongst piles and piles of paper documents.
This lack of paper management means delays, unsatisfied clients, wasted time, and wasted money.
Let me raise another key question here: What about paper waste? How much do companies even care? Does your company ever think about this issue?
Paper comes at a tremendous cost to our planet and we all know that. But, according to the statistics, it seems that very few cares.
Let’s take a look at some facts I found in The World Counts report:
Recycling 1 ton of paper saves around 682.5 gallons of oil, 26,500 liters of water and 17 trees.
It takes an average of 5 liters of water to produce one piece of A4 paper.
Printing a Sunday edition of the New York Times requires 75,000 trees!
Paper accounts for 25% of landfill waste and 33% of municipal waste.
Every tree produces enough oxygen for 3 people to breathe.
50% of the waste of businesses is composed of paper.
S offices use 12.1 trillion sheets of paper a year.
So, the question running through my mind is:
Why waste any more money, time, and effort on managing paper documents when instead, you can rely on the next generation tools that can make Case Management much easier, faster, and much more effective. All of this while saving the planet from destruction.
Let me expand on the answer.
New Generation Tools vs. Paper-Based Documents
The world evolves every day and new technologies emerge on the market as we speak. Thanks to this ‘new generation tools’ large organizations can now enhance productivity, provide greater access to certain types of information trapped in paper documents, and improve their preservation options.
With this ‘new generation tools’, large organizations are now capable of easily turning all paper documents into electronic forms which are easy to access, easy to search through, and easy to classify.
Basically, these tools enable organizations to save themselves from all the troubles of managing paper documents and in the meantime, save the Earth.
I am talking about digitalization.
But, what Exactly does Digitalization mean?
Digitalization, also known as digital image processing is the process of converting information into a computer-readable format. Paper documents are converted into their digital representations called digital images. These digital images can further be used in various ways, including full-text searching or editing.
This process starts by scanning the original paper document. The original paper document is then represented by a series of pixels arranged in a two-dimensional matrix called a bitmap or raster image. This image is then kept either on a network or transferred onto a variety of electronic storage media.
There are 3 ways in which paper documents can be digitalized:
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) – This method of document image processing makes an electronic conversion of images of typed, handwritten, or printed text into machine-encoded text. These images can either be a scanned document, a photo of a document, or a scene-photo.
Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) – This method is an advanced version of the OCR. It allows computers to learn different fonts and styles of handwriting to improve accuracy and recognition.
Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) – This is the fastest and most advanced technique of document image processing. It allows checkbox regions recognition on scanned images.
Scanning paper documents make them instantly available. These techniques of document image processing produce 2 types of files which have separate uses:
Master copy. This type of copy is created with the intent of replacing the original document. These copies are files with high quality and follow recommended standards that ensure complete and secure records.
Access copy. This type of file is a copy of the master file created with an intent to provide regular access to users. This type of copy also follows certain standards. Access copies are generally lower in quality resulting in smaller file sizes which allow for easier access.
Unlike analog data, which in the process of copying and transmitting might suffer a slight loss of quality, digital data can be copied indefinitely with absolutely no degradation.
Digitalization also increases the possibilities for using the information contained within the documents. Scanning paper documents only make them instantly available in master copies and access copies, but it also allows their further processing, managing, and maintaining.
With over a decade of digitalization experience, we at Armedia learned to rely on Ephesoft as the leading innovator in this field.
For some that are not familiar with Ephesoft, allow me a bit of time to explain who Ephesoft really is.
Why Go Digital With Ephesoft?
Ephesoft offers advanced capture solutions that help organizations run more efficiently, increase information accessibility and searchability. It allows all this by automatically classifying, separating, sorting and extracting data from scanned documents.
Here’s why Ephesoft is a safe, reliable digitalization choice:
Ephesoft makes business-critical information available to processes and customers faster and more accurately than legacy systems.
It’s the only document capture and extraction system to employ RESTful APIs, which makes it easy to integrate with third-party systems.
It’s open architecture and open-source, freeing up customers from proprietary black-box technology.
It has faster deployments when integrating with CMIS-enabled systems, including Alfresco.
It offers classification and separation without barcodes or separator sheets.
It has free-form Extraction – barcodes, key values, regular expressions.
It supports TIFFs, PNGs, PDFs, DOCs, XLSs, GIFs, and JPEGs.
It provides a platform streamlined for ease-of-use and high performance.
It’s browser-based so you don’t have to download it to a client system.
It provides significant data entry savings through less manual keying.
Ephesoft has Automated Learning for documents, emails, and faxes.
It’s Internationalized and Localized – easy to brand.
It provides LDAP and Active Directory Integration.
This September Ephesoft released Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.2. Besides the benefits I’ve listed above, this new and improved version takes document image processing and data classification to a whole new level.
Let’s see why.
Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.2
“Our goal is to make enterprise content capture and data discovery from unstructured data easily accessible and meaningful for decision-makers worldwide”Ike Kavas, Founder and CEO at Ephesoft.
For this particular reason, Ephesoft released their new and improved version of Ephesoft Transact.
As you can see from the image below, Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.2 includes 6 stages. Each of them very important and inclusive to the process.
Now let’s take a glimpse at each stage separately and see how Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.2 work.
Capture. The first stage of the process is data capture. Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.2 allows multiple ways of capturing data. From scanners, content services, mobile devices, etc., to UNC folders (network folders) and so on.
Image processing. Once the capture stage is done, the process continues with image processing. At this point in the process, documents and images are prepared for classification. This phase includes: cleaning up, rotating, improving image quality, etc.
All of this allows the resulting document to be easily identified in the third stage.
Classification. The third stage is where the system determines the type of document. This step determines if a document is, for instance, an invoice, customer record, or any other type of file specific to the industry involved.
As an advanced document capture system, Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.2 needs only one or two samples to learn to classify the document.
For this purpose, Ephesoft uses Machine Learning algorithms, a variety of techniques for data classification like search content, images, barcodes, and one document merging.
If the system shows low confidence in any document classification it calls upon a human operator for confirmation.
Extraction. At this point of the process, Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.2 identifies the metadata within documents. The reason for the existence of this stage is because metadata is very useful in organizing, finding, and feeding documents into another type of business system.
Validation. This is a stage where Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.2 validates the documents, in terms of a human assistance. In cases where there are some smudges, spills, blurry characters, or possibly missing fields in the document, the system alerts for manual verification and correction.
Export & Deliver. Once all the documents are validated, they are moved to a repository or other line of business system. These documents and data can be stored either on a local server or cloud-based storage, like Alfresco, Box or SAP.
As such, the entire process of Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.2 improves productivity, increases transactional velocity, enhances data viability, and reduces processing costs.
This new version of Ephesoft Transact includes multiple new features and improvements build on Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.0’s functionality and flexibility.
Let’s take a look at some of them.
New Features And Improvements Of Ephesoft Transact
Ike Kavas, Founder and CEO at Ephesoft talks about these new features and improvements stating:
“Pioneering advantageous features that improve our customers’ business processes is what we do, and our latest version of Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.2 helps achieve that customer success.”
Let’s dig deeper into each new feature:
1. (Add-on) Transact 4 Mortgage
Transact 4 Mortgage is an extension of Transact and this add-on provides 2 possible solutions:
Standard Solution. The standard solution of Transact 4 Mortgage is capable of processing 400 loan origination document types that are already trained and configured for classification with Ephesoft Transact.
Premium Solution. The premium solution includes over 600 loan origination document types, also, previously trained and configured for classification.
This allows the customers to save up to 2,000 hours of implementation time or approximately an 80% reduction in configuration and deployment times for an entire enterprise. Shortening the time from several months to several weeks. Customers of this add-on will enjoy improved accuracy and efficiency for much shorter time.
This add-on is also capable of grouping documents of the same document type which can be of an enormous use and save additional time.
2. (Beta) Hybrid Cloud Plugin To Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.2
For customers that need high performance that even cluster configuration of services cannot provide, Ephesoft introduces the hybrid cloud plugin.
This hybrid plugin for Ephesoft Transact enables organizations to offload the heaviest image processing or OCR demands to the AWS cloud. Thanks to AWS and parallel cloud processing, Ephesoft Transact offers users higher scalability for high performance and peak demands.
As you can see from the image above, only the image processing/OCR happens in the cloud, while the classification and extraction happen on the Transact server.
With the beta hybrid cloud for Ephesoft Transact, you only pay for what you use. This plugin can also save you money by sparing you from adding servers, maintenance, and workers to support higher processing loads. The beta version is limited to 10,000 free images monthly in a trial capacity.
3. Swagger UI
Ephesoft believes that the best way to connect and share data is through Open APIs. For that reason, they’ve decided to make documenting APIs possible with Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.2.
Swagger UI support allows modern, easier, self-documented Web Services for developers.
The Swagger UI support comes bundled with Transact for developers looking for standardized documentation. This integration feature provides standardized documentation of Ehpesoft’s existing traditional web service APIs.
Ephesoft uses this technology to create two advanced workflow Web Services Open APIs for both Nintex and Microsoft Flow.
Ephesoft uses JSON technology (JavaScript Object Notation), a lightweight data-interchange format, which makes it easier for people to read and write, and for machines to parse and generate.
These features are beneficial for both developers and non-developers by allowing them to classify documents and extract information via a simple Web Services interface.
“Users can now quickly add document capture functions to applications, removing the need for manual data entry or human intervention and increasing efficiency, accuracy and time savings.”says on the official site of Ephesoft.
4. Microsoft Exchange Header Support (Enhancement)
In Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.0, MS Exchange was introduced only for MS Exchange on the cloud. Now, with Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.2, MS Exchange includes header support and ingestion of documents for an on-premise environment. This makes the Microsoft Exchange Header Support feature available for support on both on-premise and cloud platforms.
Users can now configure the email headers (Subject, From, To and Date) to be included in the batch.xml file when processing batches via AWS.
Adding on-premise support provides extra availability to customers and expedites processing through the system.
5. PDF/A-1b Compliance For Export
Transact has typically supported single and multi-page PDFs within the export module. From Release 3.0.3.4 to 4.5.0.0, Transact has supported PDF/A compliant PDF’s for export, but not PDF/A-1b.
Now, Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.2 offers PDF/A-1b Compliance and supports searchable single and multi-page PDFs in both black and white as well as color.
The enhancement helps customers put in place more advanced archiving and long-term preservation of electronic documents into their repositories.
6. Fixed Form Extraction Performance Improvements
Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.2 came out with significant performance improvements to the Fixed Form Extraction process for Windows, used for data extraction from checkboxes and signature detection.
Customers using 16 core system will see up to 70% to 80% performance improvement, and 32 core system users will see impressive improvements up to 250% to 300% performance gains.
Impressive, isn’t it?
The faster processing of pages per minute allows organizations to quickly access their data, make more informed decisions, and improve customer satisfaction.
These new features and improvements of Ephesoft Transact are changing the world of document image processing and Case Management.
Let’s Wrap Things Up
With all of the features and improvements done by Ephesoft in their newest version of Ephesoft Transact, they’ve made the existence of paper offices outdated.
All of this features contribute to creating the following benefits in the Case Management world:
Entirely automated workflows which save time and increase productivity.
Easy access to documents which in their paper form were difficult to locate not even search through,
Integration with other applications which make ERP, CRM, ECM, and back-office programs document-capture-enabled,
Cost Savings which comes with the removal of paper document management.
Protecting our customers’ best interest and always aiming towards achieving the best, our team decided that a document image processing solution like Ephesoft Transact is a must for our customers.
If you want to find out more about our collaboration with Ephesoft or about our Solutions, don’t hesitate to contact us.
What are your thoughts about digitalization? Please share them in the comments section below.
While looking for a replacement for an Alfresco Workdesk solution for our client at USDA, I heard from a co-worker that Alfresco had released their next generation UI Framework, aka Alfresco Development Framework (ADF), to replace their Share framework.
After reviewing the community documentation and list of components catalog, I determined that ADF could be a suitable replacement for our client. After doing a few prototypes and then refactoring ADF as the replacement UI solution for our customer, I learned the following, which may be useful for the Alfresco development community.
This blog describes how to get ADF running and then discuss the pros and cons of the product. Subsequent blogs will follow, which will further decompose and discuss other salient features of the framework and why it is a good alternative to Share.
Prerequisites
To use Alfresco Development Framework, you must meet the following requirements.
You need Alfresco 5.2 or above – since ADF is dependent on the Alfresco API specifications in Alfresco 5.2, the minimum requirement to use it is Alfresco 5.2.
If you want to use Alfresco Development Framework with both ECM (Alfresco) and BPM (Activiti) – you will need Activiti 1.5.1 or higher as well. ADF is fully integrated with both with no dependencies on having one or the other.
You also need to enable Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) on both Activiti BPM and Alfresco ECM
Why Alfresco Development Framework
The first question that everyone asks is why ADF? The most prominent answers are:
It uses up-to-date UI technologies – Alfresco Development Framework is based on the Angular JS framework. It is always up to date with the latest version of Angular. This provides an improved, fast and flexible single-page experience. We can easily incorporate, extend and customize different Angular components and services into the application easily.
It uses out-of-the-box components – The ADF team has already developed multiple components that can be used without any custom code. All the components are easily configurable and manageable. You can find a list of components
It is easy to connect to Alfresco Content Service (ACS) – As ADF is fully dependent on Alfresco, its use and integration with Alfresco is easy to configure. ADF leverages Alfresco’s REST APIs to communicate with the Alfresco content repository. These REST APIs are utilized using Alfresco-js-api.
It is easy to integrate with Alfresco Process Service (APS) – If you plan to use ADF only with Alfresco Process Service (APS, i.e., Activiti BPM) or with both ACS and APS, the configuration is still simple. Again, ADF uses Alfresco’s REST APIs to communicate with Activiti. For out-of-the-box ADF, the configuration can be done by simply changing one JSON file.
It is easy for developers to get started – There is a lot of documentation, guides, demos, and tutorials to get anyone up and running with Alfresco Development Framework, including those with little Angular experience. You can also use the demo shell (Alfresco Content App – fully developed app) to get started.
It is recommended over Share by Alfresco – Although Alfresco will continue to maintain Share, they recommend custom applications be developed using Alfresco Development Framework. In addition, customizing Share is cumbersome and complex compared to ADF. Unlike Share, ADF is the best solution for a simple and flexible application.
My Experience
When I first heard about Alfresco Development Framework, I was not too familiar with Angular, so I spent some time educating myself with the Angular JS 2 framework. It is quite different than version 1 of the framework, so anyone wishing to migrate an application from version 1.x to version 2.x, plan for a multi-month effort.
After my initial education and training period, things got easier. The ADF documentation and catalog gives some insight on how to get started working with ADF. For our project, we only needed to use ADF with (ACS). However, based on this experience, using it with APS or both should be nearly the same experience.
Major Alfresco Development Framework Components
Listed below are the major Alfresco Development Framework components that were used in our project and would most likely be used in other AD projects. A brief description of these is provided, which will be followed by detailed examples in subsequent blogs.
Login Component – The main login page provides basic username-password authentication, using Alfresco REST APIs to authentic the user to the content repository. Alfresco ticket authentication is used across the application and the ticket is added to every request after the user’s initial login. The login page can be customized as-needed by adding or removing some of its properties.
Document List Component – The document list is used to access, view and manage folders and documents in the Alfresco content repository. The document list table view can also be easily customized to display custom and out-of-the-box properties in the table column.
Content Action Component – This is used to add actions to a Document List. Content Actions can be used to perform many out-of-the-box repository actions like copy, move delete, download, etc. I also added custom actions by creating Angular components and executing them from the Document List.
Data Column Component – As mentioned above, this can be used to display the metadata of a folder or a document in the Document List and can be used to sort the columns and display custom properties.
Pagination Component – This component can be used to add pagination to a component. I used this in the Document List component to paginate the listed documents, and in the custom, search component to display paginated search results.
Tool Bar Component – I used this component as a container for headers, action, and titles.
Viewer Component – This is one of the major components that Alfresco ADF includes out-of-the-box. The viewer converts files to PDF for preview. This component can easily have added to the Document List.
Challenges
I faced some challenges on my first Alfresco Development Framework project.
ADF upgrade is frequent – This is a positive most of the time, but sometimes it caused instability in UI. During the upgrade, some of the CSS customization were overwritten and messed up. For instance, I started using ADF version 2.2 and then upgraded to version 2.3. When I upgraded to version 2.4, the UI customizations were messed up. Therefore, I stayed with version 2.3.
Proxy settings and deployment – If you deploy the application in the same webserver container as Alfresco, there are no problems. But in my case, I deployed the ADF application to a separate webserver. To resolve this, I included the ADF application in a springboot project and used zuul proxy-to-proxy the requests to access Alfresco
SSO – Single sign on using external configuration was not easy to integrate. According to the ADF Team, this was implemented in Alfresco 6.0. After version 6, Alfresco added the ability for an external application to connect to Alfresco through single sign on. This was implemented using Keycloak and JWT tokens. If you are using Alfresco 5 with Kerberos, the default ADF configuration should work fine, but if you use any other external SSO with Alfresco 5, you will need to develop your own implementation from the Alfresco side and design a new login component on the ADF side.
Conclusion
When looking for a UI framework to integrate with and manipulate Alfresco or Activiti, ADF is the best choice. It provides a modern UI framework with many pre-built, out-of-the-box components. The steps to get started and integrate the framework are easy, which is another plus.
The Alfresco Content Application (ACA), the sample application shipped with ADF, can be used to get started. This sample application touches on most of the out-of-the-box features of ADF. I recommend starting with this application when developing with or customizing your ADF application.
I recommend ADF for anyone looking for a new user interface to work with Alfresco or Activiti. The challenges I face were resolved with some custom coding and twist. The ADF community is always available to help if there are any challenges during development and customization.
As we learn and implement this evolving technology into our internal and customer solutions, we will provide our lesson learned for the entire Alfresco ADF community.
The UC Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems addressed the growing need for more efficient Records Management in 2003, reporting:
“The world’s total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage. This is the equivalent of 250 megabytes per person for each man, woman, and child on earth… Over 96% of business information is in digital format, 1% is on paper and that 70% is never printed.”
In 2013, 15 years later, Seeking Alpha published a blog post in which they claim that since 2015, 90% of the world’s data has been generated:
“That year [2015], the digital universe, i.e., the reservoir of data created and copied, totaled less than 10 zettabytes – that would be 10, followed by 21 zeros. By 2020, it is expected to grow more than four times to 44 zettabytes. Just five years after that, it could reach 180 zettabytes”.
I don’t know about you, but I found this information startling.
And as the numbers show, year after year, effective records management becomes even more critical.
Government agencies are one of the largest contributors to the growth of records in the US. In addition, most of the data that government agencies create are governed by at least one data-handling legislation. This kind of complexity brings agencies to a point of having to rely on records management software.
Furthermore, things get even more complex because some of the government records should be released in the public as per the Freedom of Information Act. Then the records management system should enable the FOIA agencies to quickly, easily and legally release certain documents that can be released, while being able to do a needed redaction of that document before it is released to the requestor.
So, if you are the one in charge of choosing a records management solution for your FOIA agency, DoD 5015 compliant software is a good starting point.
Let’s shed some light on what DoD 5015 really is and why FOIA agencies need a DoD 5015 compliant software.
What Is DoD 5015 Standard?
DoD 5015 or the Design Criteria Standard for Electronic Records Management Software Solutions is a Records Management standard that resulted from the need for better management of records. The Department of Defense discovered that its record-keeping standards were lacking during the Gulf War.
As a result, DoD created a set of standards for records management which as it has evolved, has become the benchmark for private and public entities. DoD 5015 compliant software emphasizes data security, protection from data loss and data destruction.
This standard was developed in 1993 by the Department of Defense and their goal was to re-engineer internal Records Management processes. Soon after, in 1995, they published a report in which they outlined the requirements and data elements for Electronic Records Management Applications (RMA).
In 1997, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), developed the report into a testable and measurable design criteria standard known as DoD 5015.2.
The DoD standard specifies hundreds of detailed requirements that Records Management Systems must meet and assists agencies in complying with NARA initiatives.
Let’s take a look at some of the most important requirements:
Management of emails and attachments in electronic formats
Records destruction in a manner that prevents recovery
Management of records stored in electronic formats
Tools to aid the search and retrieval of records
Linking of records to supporting materials
Organization disposition instructions
Security classification markings
Organization records series
Organizational file plans
Retention calculation
Access controls
In 2007, the 3rd version of the standard was published with an addition of the following requirements:
Interface and behavioral requirements for integration with electronic Records Management Systems.
Additional metadata for e-mail, pdf, digital photographs, images, and web records.
Capability to create alerts and notifications regarding changes in metadata fields.
Capability to restrict metadata access based on the contents of fields.
Tools to support RMA-to-RMA interoperability.
FOIA/Privacy Act workflow requirements.
More automatic linking requirements.
Greater data security and integrity.
Additional transfer requirements.
Data discovery requirements.
Vital records review cycles.
A part of the 3rd version of DoD 5015 focuses on requirements that specifically support net-centric information sharing principles. The aim behind these requirements was to make records:
Visible – By developing and registering standardized metadata.
Accessible – Through Web services with useable, standardized interfaces.
Understandable – Through the availability and use of rich metadata describing the records and their context.
Why Care About DoD 5015 Compliant Software?
Records management is no longer only a technical issue. Chief officers need to spend time thinking about this because there are significant liabilities if information leakage were to happen.
Chief officers need to be proactive in how their organizations handle corporate data because the bottom line is their corporate reputation is on the line.
Perhaps the most painful non-compliance case was Hillary Clinton and how her staff handled their data. Their non-compliance probably cost Hillary her presidential race just a few years ago.
DoD 5015 compliant software helps vendors to make sure they use the best processes and technologies for handling sensitive data. Non-compliant software, that fails to keep up with DoD recommendations, will simply be pushed off the market by competitors that do make sure their solutions are compliant.
As CMSwire says: “By being certified, Records Management Solutions can assist corporations to achieve compliance and reduce risk by enabling them to control how and for how long enterprise content is retained. It also ensures destruction of that content when this time has elapsed.”
Knowing that a system has been tested against the DoD’s strict standards and achieved full compliance with DoD 5015, gives your organization the assurance that the solution you chose supports Records Management in a standardized way.
This means that the Records Management Solution, through organized record structures and plans, manages the lifecycle of all of your records. From initial capture to long-term archiving, paying special attention to:
Workflows and Business Process Management,
Federated and advanced search,
Security and access controls,
Auto-classification,
Records retention,
Version control,
eDiscovery,
FOIA, etc.
DoD 5015 compliant software will be certified to properly do the following:
Break down information silos in a standardized way which makes the team more productive, while ensuring that information is accessed in a prudent and compliant way.
Set mandatory metadata standards for all records, including different formats such as email, photos, and office documents.
Find the best methodology for the destruction of electronic records at the end of their lifecycle.
Provide a standard approach for the transfer of records from one agency to another, and for transfer from an agency to NARA.
Define metadata requirements for classified records.
Define requirements for FOIA and Privacy Act solutions.
Because of this, DoD 5015 has become a de facto Records Management standard in North America. And as the Government continues to implement these new changes and requirements, the level of consistency across the government alleviates the chaos.
How DoD 5015 Standard Affects FOIA Request Processing
Version 3 of this standard requires the Records Management vendor community to migrate towards providing “standards-compliant services to larger service-oriented architectures.” This is for achieving broader information sharing.
Version 3 DoD 5015 pays special attention to requirements supporting management of classified records, as well as requirements that support FOIA.
Records Management Applications (RMA) that support the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) have specific requirements to achieve open and improved information sharing under DoD 5015 standard:
Organization Access Rules. RMAs must provide functionality that supports authorized personnel in preparing and posting access rules for the public to gain access to FOIA Information.
Access Rule Metadata. RMAs must provide the capability for an authorized individual to create an access rules record.
FOIA Access Requests. RMAs must provide functionality that supports authorized personnel in recording, tracking and managing FOIA request.
FOIA Request Time Limits. RMAs must provide the capability for an authorized individual to set time limits that shall apply to acknowledge requests for access and for providing access.
Tracking FOIA Requests. RMAs must provide authorized individuals the capability to track FOIA Requests.
Workflow Suspense Dates. RMAs must provide the capability for an authorized individual to assign the FOIA request to a workflow or to create and assign alert logic to user-defined interim suspense dates and extensions to suspense dates.
Disclosures. RMAs must provide authorized individuals the capability to record disclosure requests and track, manage, and account for disclosures.
Managing Disclosure Request Metadata. RMAs must provide the capability for an authorized individual to create a record of an FOIA disclosure request.
Disclosure Exemptions. RMAs must provide an authorized individual with the capability to create and manage exemption records
Linking Exemptions to Records. RMAs must provide an authorized individual with the capability to link an exemption record to a record or a group of records.
Appeal Time Limits. RMAs must provide the capability for an authorized individual to set time limits that shall apply to process appeals.
FOIA Reports. RMAs must provide authorized individuals the capability to create, file, and manage FOIA Reports.
IA controls for availability, integrity, confidentiality, authentication, non-repudiation. The software must be National Telecommunications and Information Systems Security Policy-compliant.
As you can see, having a DoD 5015 compliant software is of great importance for FOIA agencies. Dealing with large amounts of data every day, Records Management and data safety is an unavoidable part of FOIA processing.
Chapter 3 of Version 3, DoD 5015 pays special attention to FOIA processing. With all the requirements listed above and much more (which you can see here), DoD 5015 takes good care of Records Management in FOIA processing.
Benefits of Adhering to the DoD 5015 Standard in FOIA Requests Management
Now, let’s take a look at some of the benefits DoD standard will bring to your FOIA agency in addition to the benefits we listed above:
DoD 5015 Compliant Software will protectevery FOIA request and all records related to that request. Including correspondences, case-related records like notes, multimedia files, etc.
DoD 5015 Compliant Software will standardize the metadata for all request-related records.
DoD 5015 Compliant Software will make sure to standardize the approach for the transfer of records from one agency to another, and for the transfer from an agency to NARA.
The DoD certification process is one of the toughest standards worldwide. And when choosing an RMA, you want to make sure it takes care of the entire lifecycle of your content. You want to make sure it provides standardized metadata, security, and access controls, version control, workflow aligned to organization processes/procedures/controls, retention, archival, federated and advanced search.
Alfresco Records Management
Alfresco is one of only 14 RMAs to have their Records Management product certified by the Department of Defense. And it was the first one to achieve this distinction. Also, it’s open-source, making it the go-to standard for cost-effective records management solutions.
Tara Combs, Alfresco’s Information Governance Specialist explains:
“We’re excited to announce this certification, which demonstrates our commitment to security and compliance. The features required for certification must include very sophisticated access control to content and records that ensure that only those who need access to content and records have access…Meeting the DoD 5015.02 CH3 standard means that customers in the U.S. government can now manage all their content – classified and unclassified – in a single, unified digital business platform that offers content, process and governance developed by a single vendor on a modern OpenStack.”
Alfresco is an open-source software companyfocused on advancing the flow of digital businesses. It provides an improved, effortless way for FOIA agencies to manage records of any type at the highest level of DoD 5015.02 security certification, including:
Electronic documents,
Images,
Emails,
Videos, etc.
The key component of Alfresco’s infrastructure is providing a basis for records retention, legal holds, disposition and intelligent storage management of both digital and physical records.
With it’s refined and straightforward automated controls and interface, Alfresco allows authorized users to set permissions, disposition, and retention policies across a single scalable repository.
Alfresco also provides a flexible and scalable BPM engine that enables users to create and engage in workflows based on organizational processes.
As such, Alfresco helps more than 1,300 industry-leaders to digitalize processes, manage content, and govern information successfully.
Some of the biggest names Alfresco helps are:
US Department of Navy,
The Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Bank of NY Mellon,
Capital One,
NASA,
Cisco, etc.
With today’s DoD certification, Alfresco can alleviate the need for government agencies to integrate and maintain separate records management solutions on the backend and provide a more effective holistic solution that is scalable and easy-to-use.
“This certification allows Alfresco to compete for business across the entire federal government, regardless of security requirements,” said Tony Franzonello, Alfresco’s regional vice president, Federal Sales.
“It removes a hurdle that could prevent some customers from swapping out their entire legacy ECM solutions for Alfresco. It also demonstrates a commitment from Alfresco to be a top-tier provider of content, process and governance services.”
“These security features allow us to meet standards in other verticals such as Financial and Insurance as well as global standards such as ISO 15489 and 16175,” said Combs.
New containerized deployment option, based on Docker and Kubernetes.
Anonymous usage metrics via Heartbeat. Alfresco Content Services send anonymous usage metrics to Alfresco through the Heartbeat service. Alfresco uses this anonymous information to meet users needs of the organization and help them understand the usage of Alfresco products.
Significant library upgrades in both the repository and Share.
Containerized deployment. This includes Alfresco Repository, Alfresco Search Services, and Alfresco Share.
Upgraded integrations. Alfresco Content Services 6.0 introduces some changes that require new releases of all modules. To upgrade to Alfresco Content Services 6.0, users need to update any of the module artifacts to which they are entitled.
Expanded REST APIs. An updated version of the REST API Explorer is provided to navigate the new REST APIs.
Code organization. Enterprise customers are able to build the artifacts from scratch provided they have an access to the Alfresco Nexus repository (enterprise-releases).
Finzel adds: “As customers embrace DevOps, infrastructure as code, the cloud, and Alfresco, the capabilities introduced in Alfresco Content Services 6.0 deliver a step change in time-to-value.”
Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of the new Alfresco Content Services 6.0:
Reduces operational cost – Customers are now able to scale the infrastructure up and down quickly depending on the current workload.
Uses trusted Open Source industry technologies – Based on Docker & Kubernetes, customers can deliver fast and standardized deployments across environments.
Accelerates development and deployment – Containers reduce environment inconsistencies and support DevOps to accelerate development and deployment from the test environment through a staging system to production.
All of this makes Alfresco the only proven ECM, open-source platform to be DoD 5015.2 certified, uniquely positioned as a cost-effective and full-featured alternative to proprietary solutions.
Alfresco, with all of its features, can be used even by customers outside of the U.S. Government. They can easily take advantage of the granular security features developed for certification and, as such, be sure that their systems are built on a platform that is the gold standard for records security.
Let’s Wrap Things Up
When choosing a Records Management Solution, FOIA and government agencies, in general, must pay special attention to security and data protection. And, when it comes to a Records Management certification, one particular standard stands out: the DoD 5015 standard.
Every government agency should start with DoD 5015 standard and look for a DoD 5015 compliant software. This standard is widely adopted as a de facto standard for all Federal agencies as endorsed by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
The reason for the endorsement is because DoD 5015 compliant software makes sure to provide Information Governance throughout the lifecycle of all content providing:
Workflow aligned to organization processes/procedures/controls,
Federated and advanced search,
Security and access controls,
Standardized metadata,
Version control,
Retention,
Archival.
This is why not all RMAs can be 5015 compliant. They must be tested against the requirements specified by the standard.
The testing must be conducted by the Joint Interoperability Test Command, part of the Defense Information Systems Agency, that tests information technology and national security systems.
The reason for the DoD 5015 compliant software is to protect your content from data loss and data destruction. The standard is designed to help users implement best-practices records declaration, classification, and records administration while improving productivity.
Armedia provides DoD compliant solutions relying on Alfresco, the only open-source data management platform that is DoD 5015 compliant.
Alfresco as the best open-source platform to be DoD 5015.2 certified, will make sure to meet your organization’ operational, legislative, and legal needs. This combination of easy-to-use yet powerful Records Management Solution helps government agencies to save time and resources while protecting and organizing all their records.
This is the reason why our team at Armedia decided to rely on Alfresco to ensure a DoD 5015 compliant software. This way, we make sure our software responds to all of your operational, legislative, and legal needs while making sure your security is in the first place.
If you have any questions about DoD 5015 compliant software or about Armedia FOIA Software Solution, feel free to ask or leave your thoughts in the comments section below.
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