Author: Kiru Veerappan

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CoDi-Self-Service

CoDi Self Service – Engaging consumers with next generation content services

by on 20 November 2017in Implementation

 

The growth of unstructured data in the enterprises has resulted in the need for building user friendly solutions to consume the content in a more efficient manner to increase productivity. Till recently majority of ECM implementations lack in wider adoption of the solution both within an organization and more so by consumers outside the organization due to the complexity in learning and change in processes. ECM systems were largely seen as storage and management of regulated content for business users within an organization. Consumers outside the firewall were selectively given access to the content in a secured fashion through enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) products like Box. But the interfaces provided by such EFSS products are mostly either through browse or search patterns. Alternately if vertical solutions say like an insurance portal, needs access to content in the context of an insurance policy holder, a point solution would have to be built by integrating the insurance portal to the content management system. This could take many weeks if not months to build and deploy.

With innovation in automation and cognitive computing combined with cloud infrastructure there are technologies available today to enable better consumption of content by consumers in a much more user friendly manner and with ease. These solutions can be built in a fraction of time otherwise needed to build point solutions.

Introducing MITS CoDi Self-Service

MITS CoDi is an Advanced Analytics solution leveraging next generation content services platform built on IBM’s industry leading ECM system combined with IBM Watson technologies. This solution can be deployed on IBM Cloud or other leading Cloud infrastructure like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services for rapid build and deployment of customer centric solutions. This solution uses machine learning, artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to intelligently identify and provide access to the content in context without the user having to neither browse nor search for the content from any location on any device in a secured fashion.

 

For a live demo of MITS CoDi Self-Service in action please contact us here reachus@mitsind.com

 

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Implementing SAML Single-Sign-On and its Challenges

by on 22 August 2017in Implementation

Recently we came across a request for implementing a SAML based Single-Sign-On solution for an educational institution. SAML stands for Security Assertion Markup Language. It’s a standard for implementation of Single-Sign-On integration between two entities to allow seamless access of content to end users without the user having to sign-on more than once.

Even though SAML as a standard has been in existence for quite some time, every implementation of a SAML based solution has its own tweaks due to the custom nature of the end products. In this case, the institution wanted to give their students, access to their financial management system from their student campus portal. The requirement was for the students to logon to their Campus Portal and access the Financial System from within the Campus Portal in a seamless fashion.

The requirement sounded simple to begin with but the devil was in the details. The institution was using a SAAS based solution for their Campus Management implementation on one side, and another SAAS based solution for their Students Financial Management. Both these providers even though claimed to support Single-Sign-On implementation, it wasn’t straightforward. Both the systems shared their interfaces for SSO implementation, but they did not allow any customization to be done at their respective ends to talk to each other. This raised a unique challenge for the institution. At MITS, we proposed a middle layer to communicate between these two providers. The following diagram gives a high level overview of our proposed solution. We built the integration services that would take care of first connecting to the Campus Portal to authenticate and receive the Student Details. Later another service would use the Student Details to perform a SAML Response submission to the Financial Management system. The authentication was done using the Identity Provider based SAML Assertion with the Financial Management system.

High Level SAML SSO Implementation Design

We were able to achieve the needs of the institution as well as satisfy the integration requirements of both the Student Campus Portal and the Financial Management System in a highly secured manner. With this solution, students can now logon to their Campus Portal for various locations and access their respective Financial Management Dashboards in a seamless fashion.

box-ibm-filenet

Managing Content between Box and IBM FileNet

by on 9 April 2017in Technology

Many organizations are leveraging the power of Cloud to engage more closely with their customers. Majority of such organizations rely on an established enterprise content management (ECM) platform like IBM FileNet to store and manage their content and records. With the advent of cloud based enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) products like Box, these organizations are raised with the challenge of managing their content between EFSS repositories and their ECM repositories.

Box and FileNet Content Synchronization

At MITS, we have been working for several years in implementing IBM FileNet based ECM solutions for our customers. In a recent project a need arose to synchronize the content stored in Box with a customer’s FileNet ECM repository and vice versa. After evaluating multiple options we implemented a set of RESTful services using our Content Director Services platform that can synchronize content between a Box repository and FileNet repository.

Solution

With Content Director Services as the intermediary layer, any content that a user stores into their system of engagement (Box) content store will be picked up in real-time and updated into the system of record (FileNet) repository. If there is a back-end user updating the content stored in system of record directly, the content director services will automatically update the corresponding document in system of engagement repository, thus resulting in a real-time synchronization of content between a system of engagement repository like Box and system of record repository like FileNet.

Benefits

Customers can leverage the power of cloud content stores like Box to easily store and manage their consumer facing content and archive them in their ECM repository whenever needed.

Real-time synchronization of content between Box and FileNet can increase productivity of content based business processes with less or no human intervention and therefore avoiding human errors.

Summary

MITS has been helping numerous organizations across the globe in development and maintenance of their ECM solutions. With our vast experience on IBM ECM products, MITS is now offering Content Director Services to their customers to help them create a new ecosystem of Cloud Content Services which can result in increased adoption of meaningful content consumption.

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DevOps in ECM

by on 8 April 2017in Technology

Organizations today are challenged with constant changes. With Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems being one of key components in an enterprise IT infrastructure, the need to deploy and maintain the latest stable releases of ECM is a constant process. Customers rely on ECM systems like IBM FileNet to manage their system of records and regulated content. These system owners are faced with constant changes both on the software releases, as well as on the application development deployments and maintenance. A need therefore arises for customers to put together a comprehensive DevOps methodology and tools in place to manage ECM system deployments.

With maturity in the DevOps technologies and tools, including cloud based products ECM systems can now be managed and maintained with less human intervention.

MITS has developed ECM Asset Manager (EAM) based on Open Source DevOps tools to address these challenges. Over the years, MTIS has developed and deployed numerous ECM solutions for customers across the globe. This vast experience has resulted in EAM that address the following:

  • Streamline creation of new ECM applications
  • Promote ECM applications between different environments
  • Perform continuous integration of ECM application modules
  • Automatically build and deploy ECM application modules
  • Perform automated testing of ECM applications
  • Automate process of upgradation and migration

MITS EAM therefore enforces and maintains SDLC standard with more automation and less human intervention. It can also track and manage ECM application components using industry standard repositories both on-premise or on the cloud.

EAM Features

EAM provides an automated approach for continuous ECM solution delivery with the following features

  • Developers – Perform Continuous Integration of ECM application modules
  • Build Engineers – can do automated build of ECM components
  • QA Technicians – can perform automated testing of ECM applications
  • Release Managers can perform continuous deployment of ECM modules, and
  • IT Managers can monitor and track the ECM application assets and their stability

EAM Benefits

An IT team involved in build and maintenance of ECM solutions can benefit greatly with a solution like EAM

  • The build and deployment will be a repetitive process based on a K.I.S.S. design principle
  • The project owners can plan and execute an iterative, incremental, collaborative, rapid and flexible application development life-cycle leveraging agile methodology
  • The improved SDLC process therefore results in
    • Automated builds
    • Automated testing
    • Transparency on application development
    • Continuous feedback assisting in early defect detection and fixing
    • Better metrics for increased visibility to management

Summary

MITS has been helping numerous organizations across the globe in development and maintenance of their ECM systems with the EAM solution. These organizations rely on the expertise and experience of MITS not just to develop new solutions but also to maintain and operate these solutions at near zero downtime thus resulting in huge savings for an IT management.