Content lifecycle

Here's what Content Management really mean. Your business can only benefit from an ECM system when these four stages of content lifecycle are in place:

Contribution

The system cannot manage content that it doesn't know about. So you need to ask your system to take in a document or a web page before it becomes managed content. This is what a process of Check In does for you.

Once checked-in, the content item is in storage.

Storage

The system stores the content in its repository, or links it to external content store. In any event, each record in the repository, each content item has metadata associated with it.

Once stored, the content item is ready for consumption.

Consumption

This is when your content begins to bring business value. If you have a Word document in the repository and would like that content to display on a web page, Dynamic Converter, a Content Server component, can create a web-viewable rendition.

If you'd like a PDF version to send out to customers, a PDF Converter component will do just that. And you don't need to update three different copies. One document can have many renditions.

Once the content reaches the end of its life cycle, it's ready for disposition.

Disposition

When an employee terminates, his or her profile needs to be taken out of the company directory. Old files that are no longer used are wasting your disk space and indexing cycles.

When a corporate deal is complete, you don't want to keep your records longer than required by law. Some of the files may have information that, in case of a lawsuit, you'd much rather had been destroyed. But people forget and the content may still be there. A delight for an opposing party's law firm!

So Content Server gives you expiry and archiving controls (We'll be looking at those in Chapter 4 and Chapter 10, Customizing Oracle UCM). If you need more functionality, Oracle offers a Content Server add-on for a DOD 5015.2-compliant Records Management System.