By Mitchell Palski, Oracle WebCenter Sales Consultant
Identifying the Problem
Public Sector organizations often times face painful challenges managing their enterprise content. Too many organizations leverage multiple disparate content management systems that present difficulties in standardizing where and how content is processed and stored. The results are manual business processes that are not only tedious and inefficient, but also lack the functionality to provide adequate content quality-assurance, approval automation, and process traceability. To compound upon those issues, these processes also frequently depend on the involvement of development staff to drive and manage their completion. Content management tasks that are business-driven rely on IT resources, limiting the productivity of the organization to deliver new innovative IT services.
Oracle WebCenter - Complete Enterprise Content Management
Oracle WebCenter is the center of engagement for business. It helps people work together more efficiently through contextual collaboration tools that optimize connections between people, information, and applications and ensures users have access to the right information in the context of the business process in which they are engaged. One of the Oracle WebCenter products is Oracle WebCenter Content – an enterprise-class content management solution that empowers employees and content-enables business processes throughout your organization. Oracle WebCenter Content helps organizations lower costs and reduce risks while improving productivity and agility.
Oracle WebCenter includes best of breed web content management (WCM) capabilities that segregates its user interface into distinct roles that provides a productive and focused user experience. These WCM capabilities provide revolutionary web content management tools that allow business users to access and update web content from their browsers, their desktops, and their business applications. Some of Oracle WebCenter’s content management features include:
- User-focused, specialized interfaces
- Desktop integration with Microsoft Office products and Windows Explorer
- Mobile apps for smart phones and tablets
- Embedded BPM Suite provides one platform for workflows and approvals
Some of Oracle WebCenter’s WCM-specific features include:
- Services-based architecture enables web content management services to be consumed in web, portal and development environments
- Automatic conversion of +500 document and image formats
- Integrated with digital asset management capabilities
- In-context updates of content
- Support for multi-lingual sites
As an integrated component of your enterprise solution, Oracle WebCenter Content:
- Easily deploys and integrates for an immediate ROI
- Ensures that content meets organizational compliance standards
- Drives increased productivity through business user engagement
Workflow and Oracle WebCenter Content
Before designing a workflow, organizations must evaluate how their current processes operate. Process flow diagrams are a great way to create visual representations of your existing processes. It’s important to review, analyze, and improve your existing process models before implementing them. Oracle WebCenter has tight out-of-the-box integration with Oracle Business Process Management (BPM) Suite which includes Oracle Process Composer – a web-based tool that enables business users to design and test business processes in a visual representation.
Oracle BPM is the enterprise class process management tool of choice when delivering complex service-based workflows to your organization. No matter which tool(s) your organization uses, it is always important to:
- Understand your process flow
- Verify the metadata needed to complete the workflow
- Understand what users and/or roles will be responsible for each step
If your workflows are relatively simple, your business analysts can model them using tools like Microsoft Visio. Your organization can then leverage the native workflow engine within Oracle WebCenter Content to deliver those content-based workflows.
The Oracle WebCenter Content native workflow engine provides three types of workflows:
- A basic workflow defines the review process for specific content items, and must be initiated manually
- A criteria workflow is used for content that enters a workflow automatically based on metadata that matches predefined criteria
- A sub-workflow is initiated from a step in another workflow and is created in the same manner as criteria workflows. Sub-workflows are useful for splitting large, complex workflows into manageable pieces
Email is sent to the participating contributors and reviewers involved in workflow steps. Reviewers can review content, reject or approve content, and view information about the content and the workflow. If the content is rejected, reviewer can enter a message to explain the reason for rejection. The message is sent to the reviewers assigned to the last step allowing a contribution. Those reviewers can then check out the content, edit it and check the content back in.
Benefits of Workflow to WCM
Designing a workflow requires you to examine and understand your business processes, helping you find areas for improvement. Setting up workflows for a business process can provide several advantages:
- Workflows provide good reporting metrics. They can produce an audit trail of who signed off on content at various points of the life cycle of the content
- Workflows help get the right information to the right person at the right times
Automated workflows remove human dependencies and reduce risk for your organization.
If your current processes rely heavily on manual human intervention, here are some of the long term and short term risks that your organization faces:
| Short Term | Long Term |
| “Fat fingering” errors | Lack of institutional knowledge for workflows |
| Inconsistent publishing and branding | Decreased IT productivity |
| Lost or forgotten content updates | Inability to analyze and enhance existing processes |
| Frustrated employees and end users | Loss of user-loyalty due to outdated web content |
Implementing workflows to manage the web content of your enterprise is a safe, low-risk investment with a tremendous upside. Aside from the ROI your organization will realize from content-publishing efficiencies, workflow-enabled web content also relieves the burden of making administrative updates from your IT staff. The result of a workflow-driven web content management system is an improved web experience for end users and a more productive, happier workplace for your employees. Consider implementing Oracle WebCenter Content and it’s WCM capabilities to empower your business users and deliver a sustainable solution for your enterprise.