Alfresco Federation Services: A single view of information across content siloes
Alfresco Software, an open source, content services provider announced the availability of Alfresco Federation Services. Alfresco Federation Services, a powerful new capability that runs on the Alfresco Digital Business Platform, helps enterprises manage, connect and protect their important information across multiple, disparate content applications, network file shares, and email systems .
It enables designated employees to conduct simultaneous searches across more than sixty different business and content repositories (e.g. Box, Documentum, Dropbox, IBM FileNet, Google Drive, Microsoft SharePoint, Network File Shares, OpenText, Slack, and many other content systems) from a single, controlled interface in order to serve up relevant information quickly.
Federation services has become a top roadmap priority and a trend that is shaping content services strategies for enterprise. According to Forrester, “large enterprises often have multiple content management applications. Firms that grow via acquisition will have overlapping and redundant systems.
“While migration to modern platforms and cloud services is on many road maps, the time and effort can be a barrier to innovation and modernization. Content integration and federation services help EA pros harvest, sync, and normalize content and related metadata across multiple systems. Cross-repository applications can surface content from a range of systems, hiding complexity from end users.”
Searching for the right information in one system can be difficult, but this is compounded when multiple systems are in play – negatively impacting employee productivity and challenging regulatory compliance and records management.
Additionally, with more people working remotely, the ability to manage and control an organization’s content securely is further exacerbated.
Tony Grout, Chief Product Officer, Alfresco, noted: “The coronavirus pandemic is fundamentally changing the way enterprises need to operate for the foreseeable future – in many respects, it has become a lightning rod for digital transformation.
“As government agencies and businesses around the world are quarantining their employees and exercising corporate social distancing, ‘working from home’ has become the new reality placing an enormous strain on enterprises with 5,000, 20,000 or more employees.
“These organizations must implement systems that allow every employee to gain access to the information they need to complete their tasks – a bigger challenge for those organizations who rely on legacy, on premise systems that now must move to the cloud.
“Of particular concern is the underlying security, regulatory compliance, and records management that needs to be put in place.”
With Alfresco Federation Services, employees can find the information they need faster, and then be able to perform the tasks they want to – all from their desktop, no matter where they are located.
It also enables organizations to keep their information stored in its current repository or application, but still enjoy the benefits of the Alfresco Digital Business Platform by creating a connection between the content and repository to facilitate retention, holds, dispositions and workflow.
Tony Grout continued: “In these unprecedented times, having the ability to manage information in their current locations (‘manage-in-place’) and control the content and records that are distributed across different systems is a critical capability that Alfresco Federation Services delivers.
“Regardless of where the content lives, employees can search and govern documents (as well as apply consistent retention polices across their content) irrespective of whether it is stored in Alfresco or non-Alfresco applications – without ever leaving their Alfresco environment – and take action upon the search results.”
Forrester reported that “enterprises continue to use a mix of applications from multiple vendors, both on-premises and in the cloud. Companies focused on growth will inherit content management systems from merger-and-acquisition activities.
“Harvesting this diverse content and related data with interoperability or federation capabilities is often a faster path to business value than costly migration efforts.”