Problem

A leading computer manufacturer wanted to add collaboration capabilities to it next-generation content management product. They determined that adding collaborative process automation would be an excellent way to add value for groups of users, by enabling them to coordinate their use of documents in the repository. Their existing application supported triggers and limited execution of command scripts. Their new version would support workflow-based automation, and also provide the ability to define various document routing tasks in terms of workflows.

Solution

Based on their requirements, this company decided to work with Nouveau Systems to integrate the Nouveau Alliance Collaboration Platform and Workflow Automation Service into their content management system. The also asked Nouveau Systems to develop a document routing application for Nouveau Alliance and integrate with their core product. Key features that influenced their decision were:

Flexible workflow automation. The content management application required the ability to dynamically launch workflows based on events such as documents added, modified, or changed. It also required dynamically creating new workflow definitions to manage new document routing tasks. The Nouveau Alliance Workflow Automation Service enables workflows to be launched based on a full range of externally triggered events. It also enables the dynamic creation, installation, and execution of new workflow definitions based on parameters, such as from a document routing form. The Nouveau Alliance Workflow Automation Service provided the kind of flexible workflow automation to meet the application's needs.

Collaboration. The company wanted to move their application from providing basic content management into the high-value collaborative content mamagement space. This required providing a range of collaboration features, including the ability to handle real-time process collaboration, presence management, and user identity. The Noueau Alliance Collaboration Platform provides a full range collaboration capabilities including collaborative process management, real-time collaboration, presence, and user identity mamagement. The collaboration features of the Nouveau Alliance Collaboration Platform made it possible to make advanced collaborative process management capabilities available to user of the content managment application.

Scalablility. The company also wanted to scale their content managment application from a small group to an enterprise deployment, and required a workflow automation architecture that can scale to meet the needs of the enterprise. The Noueau Alliance Collaboration Server and Workflow Automation Service provide a scalable architecture that enables distributed management of workflow processes in an enterprise-scale peer network . Integrating the Nouevau Alliance Collaboration Server and Workflow Automation Service provides the ability to manage workflow processes across an enterprise-wide deloyment of content management systems.

Ease of deployment. To meet the needs of customers with few IT resources, the workflow automation system integrated into the content managment system had to be simple and reilable to install and integrate into the overall product installation process. The Nouveau Alliance Collaboation and Workflow Automation service is extremely reliable, and simple to install, configure, and integrate into existing application installers. This made it easy to deploy the Nouveau Alliance Collaboration Server and Workflow Automation Service with the new content managmement application on every supported platform.

Results

Partnering with Nouveau Systems, this leading computer manufacturer was able to provide advance collaboration, workflow automation, and document routing functionality by integrating Nouveau Alliance Collaboration Server and Workflow Automation Service into their content managment product. As a result, this company was able to offer workflow-enabled automation and collaborative content managment features to their customers with a much smaller development effort than with other collaboration platform and workflow automation technologies.