Companies continue to explore technologies that will allow them to gain better visibility into their unstructured and structured content while providing an environment that fosters intuitive information sharing.

The organization, access and retrieval of unstructured data presents many challenges. This information type typically resides in multiple repositories, and rarely interacts with each other or the structured data held in varied databases. As an example; Emails, Documents and Excel files are traditionally stored on the users desktop or in corporate shared folders. The naming of shared folders rarely has consistency and this makes relevant search and retrieval extremely time consuming if not impossible.

Approaches to this challenge are varied and are based around finding ways to bring structure to the unstructured world. Examples include a) requiring users to check in/out documents from the database – good in theory, however not practical for the end users. b) Enforce a policy that requires users to tag documents before placing them on the network share, again not practical. c) Using databases that allow users to provide links as a method of associating unstructured content with a relevant structured data set (customer, project, client etc) – again inconvenient, and more importantly, who updates the links when content is moved to a different location?

The Novabrain Integration Application allows organizations to keep existing documents and content where they are (no need to move/lock into a database), keeps the content in its original format, and pulls relevant structured data from your databases to create a business object. A business object is an XML file that contains structured data and is stored in your shared folder. This object is the anchor for content association. All documents stored under the business object assume the structured content. As a result, users now know where to store content, can retrieve content by searching on keywords and structured content (e.g. customer X proposal that contains the keyword “progress stage”), and a central view is obtained. In one view, users can see all email, documents, pictures etc that relate to the business object – all without adding another database to your environment.

From Chaos to Order – made possible by Novabrain!