Foreword

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is getting a lot of attention in corporations around the world today. Corporations create a large amount of unstructured content in the form of documents, scanned content, videos, audio, photos, images, and so on. Some statistics show that more than 80 percent of a corporation's intellectual property exists in the form of unstructured data. If that much of a corporation's intellectual property exists in an unstructured format how much time do employees spend searching the corporate network to locate and gather information? How much disk space do we consume saving copy after copy, revision upon revision of content only so we can find it later just to find we forgot where we put it?

This is where ECM system comes in to play. They are designed to manage unstructured content, provide search tools, enforce content security rules, web publishing, provide repository services to business systems, and many other functions depending on product offerings and corporate needs.

This book focuses on the ECM products offered by Oracle. In 2007 Oracle acquired Stellent, and has been working to integrate the Content Server into the entire Oracle product line. Oracle's vision is to offer a complete application stack integrating all the applications any organization needs to operate from top to bottom. Oracle has taken the Content Server core and plugged it into the Fusion Middleware stack giving repository services capability to all the enterprise business systems Oracle owns.

As UCM grows in adoption in organizations administrators are faced with managing a system that may be rapidly growing in usage creating a huge demands for UCM services. Understanding Oracle UCM, how it works, how to set it up and administration is essential to having an ECM system that performs and provides services expected by the end users.

There are many books about ECM and ECM systems in general but very few that cover Oracle Content Management products. If you want to learn about the Oracle Content Management system you would need to attend training classes or pour over the Oracle documentation to find out the information you need to install and set up UCM. This book condenses the Oracle documentation into short and understandable descriptions, and step by step instructions about how to set up, configure, and understand the workings of Oracle UCM version 10gR3. The language used by the author is very understandable and each topic is explained in plain talk, which makes the context of the book easy to understand by new as well as experienced administrators and users. This book does not cover hardware configurations and setup which is an entirely separate topic that depends on your organizations preferences for OS types, hardware manufacturer, and requirements but it will get you up and running and ready to manage your content once the hardware resources have been installed and configured to run in your organizations environment.

I don't understand what this sentence is trying to say!! All you need to do is open it up to any page and start reading. If you are an experienced administrator you will see how informational the book is. If you are a new to Oracle UCM you will enjoy getting right to the workings of Oracle UCM and quickly get to setting up your new UCM environment.

Allan Hoof,

Oracle UCM expert and President of the IOUG

Oracle Content Management Special Interest Group

Allan Hoof has been focused on implementing technology since the mid 90's. He started in the data management area focusing on the data files for the 3D CAD system Pro/ENGINEER. In 1997 he transitioned into the Enterprise Content Management field using Stellent products and continued with the Oracle Content Management products after the Oracle acquisition of Stellent. In his current position he manages the ECM environment which houses over 2 million content items in the ECM system. Allan also volunteers as the Oracle Content Management Special Interest Group (OCM SIG) President and as a COLLABORATE Conference Committee Content Management Track Manager with the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG).