Main features

Nuxeo Enterprise Platform provides a wide range of functional components that help address the whole scope of Enterprise Content Management. Please read below the main features and functional components of the platform.

Document Management

This component is the applicative base of Nuxeo 5 EP, providing all document management related features. The Nuxeo 5 developers believe that the separation of Document Management and Collaboration isn't possible anymore: you have to manage the document from its inception through its publication to its archiving or deletion. Collaboration is a crucial part of Document Management because it allows people to create the document and make it evolve. We used this approach to create the Document Management component, and included a lot of collaboration features.

Main features:

• Workspaces to create and work on documents (workspaces typically put together a team of people with different roles and a set of documents they have to work on)
• Flexible versioning of documents (using configurable versioning policy)
• Multi-dimensional File Plans to properly organize your content following several axis
• Document Life Cycle Management using the business process engine
• Collaboration features such as comments, on-demand notifications, etc.
• Publishing / Filing into the file plan following associated processes
• Search / Query interface to the document repository
• Reporting / Business Intelligence directly from the content repository
• Unique Identifier Generator that can generate meaningful UID for documents using configurable profiles (this allows to implement the organizations’ existing UID rules)
• Pleasant User Experience as an important goal of the system because we believe that it plays a major role in deployments / projects success

In Nuxeo 5 paradigm, Workspaces are areas of document production. Users can work collaboratively or alone in those workspaces to produce content. This also encourages users to put documents into the system, since they can directly use the document management system to work on their documents and not only reference it (as it’s the case in many major document management systems). Workspaces typically forms an organized hierarchy dedicated to document production. It could be seen as a production-oriented file plan.

Moreover, business processes can be applied on documents in workspaces (ex: review, approval, publishing, etc.). They can also be published into one or several sections (composed of “Sections”).

Workspaces are a powerful way to create, work and manage your documents. It offers an innovative approach binding document management and collaboration together.

Business Process Management

This component allows managing processes related to documents.

Based on a powerful BPM engine, it deeply integrates business processes with document management allowing processes to work in relation with the content repository. Processes can then act on documents (modify metadata, change lifecycle’s state, modify security / access rights, publish, generate new documents, manage versions, lock/unloch documents, etc.). A process can act on one or several documents.

The default implementation of Nuxeo 5 EP comes with several standard processes that address much of basic needs related to document management:

• Publishing: this process allows document publishing from a workspace to one or more sections of the file plan. To be effectively published, documents have to be approved by managers of destination sections. Each section manager can approve/reject the document in his own section.
• Collaborative Review: this process allows a user to select one or several users and ask them to review the document. Each assigned user has an instruction describing the task he has to do on the document. When he completes his task, he marks the document as “done”. When all users have completed their respective tasks, the document is flagged as reviewed. This is very useful for collaborative review of documents (for example, make this document reviewed by your team for proof-reading and suggestions).
• Approval Review: the approval review is designed to change the lifecycle state of the document. When a user wants an approval review, he starts the process, selects one or more users (and an instruction for each) and order them, choose the desired lifecycle state and some options (is the document modifiable, if yes what kind of versioning profile is used, are comments authorized, etc.). Assigned users can each after each approve or reject the document. When a user approves it, the document goes to the next one and if he rejects it, it goes back to the previous one. When all users have approved the document, the lifecycle is automatically set to the initially selected one. This kind of review is very generic and useful to mimic real-world approval processes. You can use it to make a document approved, archive it, make it obsolete, etc. Following our experience, this addresses 80% of approval processes needs of today’s organizations.

Of course, any business process or workflow can be implemented using this component.

This component relies on the robust, flexible, proven open source BPM engine JBoss jBPM. This ensures that our customers will be able to implement any process and workflow they need.

Transformation Service

"File transformation made easy!

This component provides capabilities to convert between formats or apply transformations to files.

Transformers are plug-ins in charge of transforming some format into other ones (ex: word to pdf) using required library or tools. Transformers can be chained into Transformation Chains to implement complex transformation schemes.

Currently, this component offers the following major transformation engines:

• Adobe LiveCycle PDF Generator: wide variety of formats to PDF and PDF to HTML, Plain Text, etc.
• Adobe LiveCycle Assembler: concatenate PDF, add watermark, etc.
• ImageMagick: image conversion, resize, crop, add watermark, add label, etc.
• OpenOffice: convert files (supported by OpenOffice.org) to OpenDocument, Plain Text, PDF or HTML

Transformation can be triggered manually, by the user, or automatically by rules reacting on events (ex: file modification). For example, you can easily configure the system to transform all files to PDF when a document is approved or published.

To simplify usage, it is possible to call a transformation of format specifying only desired output format. The service will try guessing the input file format and finding the best transformation path to output the required format. This considerably eases automatic format conversion because it is often not possible to know what file format a user will attach to a document. Given this feature, the system will simply find the best way to output the required format from the input file.

To know more about supported in/out file format, you can read the Transformation Matrix: engines, file formats and features. Developers can, of course, easily create new transformation engine plug-ins to support more formats or transformation features.

Retention Service

Nuxeo 5 includes a flexible and pluggable retention policy server for Nuxeo 5.

This service allows to define Retention Profiles. A Retention Profile is a set of Retention Rules associated with a Retention Action. A Retention Rule is basically a constraint. When a document matches expressed constraint, the system applies the related Retention Action or flags the document for deferred execution of the action (if the Retention Action specifies an execution delay).

Constraints can be expressed on type, metadata, lifecycle state, history, etc. of documents. This allows a highly-flexible model to define retention profiles.

The system implements the following Retention Actions by default that can be used in Retention Rules:

• Move Or Copy: move or copy the document to another location
• Transform: apply a transformation on attached files (ex: transform to PDF)
• Degrade: get rid of no longer needed associated information
• Archive
• Destroy

Of course, new Retention Actions can be added using plug-ins or scripts.

Technically, the retention policy is based on the leading open source rule engine JBoss JRules, performing light-speed rule evaluation on the content repository. Retention Rules can be written in the embedded specific language (that even non-technical users can learn) or in any JRules’s supported language (Java, Groovy, JavaScript, Microsoft Excel decision table, etc.).

Audit Trail

The Audit service is responsible for logging all system and user activity. This service maintains a complete log of all actions performed in the system and exposes it through reports or dedicated user interfaces (ex: on a document, the history tab shows the audit log of all actions performed on the document).

Technically the audit log is saved into an SQL database. Report generation is then made very easy using common reporting tools available on the market.

This service is a master piece for compliance management. It can be used to generate reports conforming to regulation rules and requirements.

Subscriptions and notificationsThis component handles the notification of users when an event happens in the system. Events such as “document creation”, “comment added”, “document removal”, “document publishing”, etc., are triggered whenever the system does a change which could be of interest to someone.

Users can subscribe to these notifications for given areas (for instance a workspace, a publishing space, a document...) and the system will notify them when when the corresponding event is triggered in that area.

Notifications can be sent along several channels (email, instant messaging, SMS) according to user preferences and available system options.

Compliance

To be written RSN.

Web Content Management

To be written RSN.