Document Management System, bring it along Jedox !!!

Hi,

In another series of my post, today, I would like to introduce you to the power of document management system and how it can greatly simplify the office workflow processes and document management in any enterprise.

And to add, how it can be easily integrated in your Jedox portal to add-on the power to your Jedox usage experience.

Q- So what is Document Management System, what are its features and benefits ?

A- One of the big questions revolve around any system (IT) to be incorporated in the main stream business, is it really worth investing the money, time, labour to achieve the benefits. And what are the benefits ?

Well in this case of incorporating any document management system, the benefits are enormous: To name few document version, security, template generation, preview (if your system offers), collaboration,  auditing and more.

So being a developer, I like to follow a principle famous in the community DRY (Don’t repeat yourself). So in order to be efficient in this post for answering the above question, I providing some useful hyper links for viewers to gain the good insight into the feature’s of the product/system has to offer !!!

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_management_system

Q- How would the Document Management System, integrate and add value with my existing Jedox installation ?

A- Now on this question I would like to elaborate in detail in this post and give more insight as the added value and benefits realized when document management system is incorporated along with your organisation BI platform.

Background

Every Project/Task has a Paper Work: In any organisation, when dealt with any Projects which can include financial planning, invoicing, reports,  approvals  and much more.

Some things can be a system in itself, like approvals (or similar) can be built in another system like SharePoint forms, or custom HTML forms to eliminate the custom document/emails and stream  line the process for more clarity.

But not every thing can be built out, no matter how simplified the form creation is, the office documents (in the form of Word, Excel, Outlook emails) makes their way in to fully efficient business system.

Some of the examples, are like organisations using email for approvals, reports stored on shared drives, custom word document with the first page dedicated to the a massive table listing the authors, and anonymous excel file all over the place…

Jedox Dimensions Drive Document Space: In many Jedox implementations, I have realised the of document generated by the business in the regular operation are usually categorised by the combination of Jedox dimension values

Example: For “Scenario” (Forecast_01 , Dimension)  the “Department” (Sales , Dimension) for the “Year” (2012 , Dimension) the “Sales Report” (this is the document)

In the above conversation statement, the user has pronounced the double quoted dimension values identifying the document.

Security: In many organisations, still people use the shared folders to achieve the collaboration of documents across teams and individuals, via the file/folder permissions. Its good while it last unless things get little out of hand and disaster strikes. File is readable by all users of the organisation, because IT revised permissions of all folders, or hierarchy update of permissions are few to blame.

Standardization: I am the approval manager, and users send me documents of whole wide variety of colours, fonts, shapes…, driving me mad to the find the relevant information I am looking for approval and permission.

System

For the above background, I have evaluated multiple systems, with one to name in this post attracting my attention with its great features is “OpenKM”. I found this document management system, very good and I was very impressed by its features provided, much added benefits even with its paid competitors and clarity of usage and clean interface.

http://www.openkm.com/en/

http://wiki.openkm.com/index.php/Main_Page

Jedox Integration:

Picture speaks a thousand word !!!

There are a great set of API with OpenKM web service calls whose structure is in-line with Jedox, to integrate well with custom PHP scripts based on the needs.

Integration scenario: The OpenKM roles/groups can be matched with the Jedox and security protected directory structure can be generated based on dimensional elements via scripts where the the permissions are driven by Jedox (regular script sync) for providing the user their space for their document storage pertaining to their dimensional area (like forecasting, based on project name)  operations, and can be shared on demand across users for efficient collaboration and notifications.

The integration between a Jedox model and OpenKM is purely business specific requirements based hence generic tool or utility wouldn’t be of much use, but in this post I am trying to highlight the added benefits of a document management system in relation to Jedox for bringing more organisation and features to the business process leveraged by Jedox.

Hope it helps !!!