Microsoft SharePoint and Coextant Hyper.Net were used to deliver a solution that enables the College to manage its unstructured data in a more efficient way by automating the document lifecycle through tracking, authoring and publishing. This has allowed the College to capture and input documents into the system, to manage them with full version control and workflow, and then to publish them accordingly.
"A pure content management approach is not capable of supporting and automating the vast numbers of processes and documents found in a university environment," explained Robert Nederby, Managing Director Coextant Systems A/S. "At EUCNord, as with all of our clients, our overall approach is instead one of Integrated Information Management. This provides our customers with the ability to capture and retain documents, publish approved documents into Microsoft .Net or SharePoint Portal-based Web sites, and carry all of this out in an integrated Microsoft SharePoint collaborative environment."
The most critical requirements were identified as:
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Authors must be able to work with the same authoring technology in a number of locations.
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All authored content must be stored in centralized document store. The document store must provide functions for version control, audit trails, and review/approval workflow.
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Usage of the document store must be transparent to users, and in a 99% respect appear to the user as if the document is being stored on a network file share. In other words, the need to deploy user training must be eliminated.
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All authored content must be immediately deployed to the web without the interaction of any individuals for format conversion.
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Deployed content must be in today's standard web formats (XML/HTML, hypertext, PDF, multi-media formats), and in the future the solution must support new formats as they evolve.
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The web site must be self-structuring and organizing depending on the content and metadata defined for content that has been placed into the system, without the interaction of any individuals for organization or placement.
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Hyper.Net Automated Office to Web Transformation and Publishing
When EUCNord's authors check documents into SharePoint document libraries, Hyper.Net transforms them immediately into relational XML data stored in MS SQL Server. Because the documents have been transformed into true web content organized as relational data, their content can easily be streamed into and displayed in any internal or external Web sites.
Figure 1 Hyper.Net's Automated Office to Web Transformation
Hyper.Net's core function is to decompose documents into XML blobs that represent a document hierarchically. For example publications, topics, metadata, security notations, etc. Within each topic there are XML constructs for paragraphs, tables, images, etc. The XML blobs are populated into a relational database and are selectable based on various criteria. Criteria can include publication title, author, version, source, any metadata value or a combination of these.
Topics can be combined in any way by the web application. They can be re-ordered or combined to create new 'publications.' Subsets of topics can be selected for different user groups (using metadata for interest-based selection or security notations in authenticated environments). In addition, Hyper.Net implements a pre-transformation process which creates a statically-'compiled' HTML result. to support solutions with large numbers of simultaneous users. This is stored in the relational database with each XML record. Because this HTML is created from the XML using XSLT, the HTML can have any flavor. Other required formats such as WML or vanilla versions of HTML can be dynamically generated from the XML as well. PDF renditions with watermarks are also a supported rendition format. All associated renditions for a document are associated with its "publication" records in the relational database. These records are all simultaneously selectable.
Hyper.Net's Web Site Development Framework
The EUCNord web site itself was designed as an application programmed in Microsoft .NET using Hyper.Net's rapid application development framework, which provides portlet-style components that enable fast implementation of standard web concepts such as tables of contents, topic display areas, etc.
The web application is responsible for determining how content is selected, grouped, and displayed. All content is dynamically selected and displayed on-demand by the web application. Normally this means selection of publications and all of the topics (BLOBs) belonging to them. However the selection can take a "virtual view" approach based on metadata or full-text search results instead of taking the traditional publication container approach. The resulting "hits" can then be organized into a "virtual publication" that fits the user's need.
Hyper.Net provides a framework that abstracts the programming level of database selection to the publication level. This allowed EUCNord's developers to work with an object-oriented API that provides quick access to publications, topics, searches, metadata definitions, etc., as well as to the XML structures within each topic (tables, bullet items, etc).
"Developers did not need to implement an n-tier architecture from scratch because an n-tier infrastructure—specifically optimized for delivering rich hierarchical and multi-media content—is provided by the Hyper.Net Framework. This creates the very powerful benefit of being able to serve content to different users simultaneously using different taxonomies and appearances. The ability to completely reorganize the web site in the future without requiring changes to the authored content or its storage taxonomy is a long-term benefit," explains Robert Nederby.
The resulting web site provided dynamic selection, automated organization and placement of content, and automatically-configuring menu systems that would dynamically change depending on the user's location within the site. Metadata defined for the documents at check-in was used in these functions.