If you walked down the halls of your office and observed your colleagues, or talked to your friends over lunch about what they are working on, chances are good that they are using a lot of different files, documents and images throughout the course of their day, depending upon what their jobs are.
This in itself is not surprising. Of course the HR person is dealing with resumes that are DOC or PDF files, the Accounts Payable person is dealing with invoices that were scanned or faxed in as TIFF images and the graphic designer spends most of her day dealing with Illustrator files. But when you ask these same people where they store and keep this information, you are likely to hear about all sorts of locations, some familiar and some unknown. The designer might be storing Illustrator files on an external hard drive connected to her Mac or in her own digital asset library. Those HR docs are going into a SharePoint library that replaced the old network file store they used to use and those invoices are stored in the ERP system used to pay vendors - an Oracle system, no doubt! ![:)]( ":)")
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.The problem is that Content is everywhere and for most companies, not well coordinated or managed. If you asked any one of these people, they would likely say their current system is just fine for them. Why? Because they know whereit is stored and they have become very familiar with their particular storage system. When they need something, they know where to look, even before they have details of the file name, account or vendor name, etc.
This is great until those people with this knowledge leave the company or are hit by a bus. Now what? Where is that valuable content that you are now being urgently asked for? Are you sure you know? And what about using that same information across departments or within other business systems? When companies have information stored across locations, repositories or even scattered within the cloud, the opportunity to lose information grows along with the number of locations in use.
Our mission here on the Oracle WebCenter team is to help companies do more with the information they have and optimize the way users, customers and partners directly engage with that information. The next few blog posts will deal with Content @ Work. We will focus on how to make the most of it, how to optimize the way it is stored to lower costs and how to make it easier to find what is needed - no matter who is looking for it.
We hope you find it informative and we thank you for subscribing to the WebCenter Blog!