Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is dead–Gartner declared in 2017. Taking its place is the more dynamic and flexible approach called “Content Services.”
Content Services is not, in and of itself, an actual technology, but is rather a strategic approach for managing and solving content-related problems. It empowers modern organizations to tame content chaos by connecting information across the enterprise, thus improving business performance and delivering competitive advantages. “It blends the reality of what is happening now in the digital enterprise and the emerging technology of the near future,” Gartner stated.
Nuxeo, developer of the leading Content Services Platform (CSP), is committed to helping organizations solve legacy information management challenges by offering a modern and open approach to content services. Their open-source, services-oriented CSP, the Nuxeo Platform, enables businesses to unlock the full value of their digital content–wherever they live.
SourceForge recently had the chance to speak with David Jones, the VP of Product Marketing at Nuxeo, to discuss the latest enhancements to its Nuxeo Platform and how these new capabilities are helping to manage the content demands of modern organizations. Jones also sheds light on how Nuxeo is incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies in their offerings.
Q: What has been Nuxeo up to since we last spoke?
David Jones, VP of Product Marketing at Nuxeo
A: We have been working very hard to further strengthen our foundation for building intelligent solutions that connect information across the enterprise, improving business performance and delivering competitive advantage. In August, we released Nuxeo 10.2, an update to our intelligent information management platform that enables enterprises to build personalized business solutions to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time on any device. In addition to this, we’ve also been recently recognized for many of our achievements, including:
- “Visionary” in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms
- A “2018 Trend-Setting Product” by KM World;
- One of the 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management in 2018 by KM World;
- One of the Constellation ShortList™ for Digital Asset Management (DAM) for Digital Experience (DX) in Q3 2018
- One of the 19 leading solutions in Gartner’s Market Guide for Digital Asset Management;
- A “Leader” in the “Aragon Research Globe for Enterprise Video, 2018: Making Customer Journeys Visual” report
- Recognized as a Strong Performer in the 2018 Forrester Research Wave for Digital Asset Management
- Featured as a “Leader” in the 2018 ECM Value Matrix from Nucleus Research
- ‘Innovator’ in the 2018 Aragon Research Globe Report for ECM
- Named one of Inc. Magazine’s 2018 Best Workplaces
Q: Can you please tell us more about Nuxeo Fast Track 10.2? What are its highlights?
A: Nuxeo Fast Track 10.2 introduces several updates and adds new features to the core Nuxeo Platform — notably enhanced capabilities for annotations, including the ability for users to annotate office documents, images, videos, PDFs, and AutoCAD documents for review/validation processes or for media enrichment. The new release is an intelligent information management platform that enables enterprises to build personalized business solutions to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time on any device. This strengthens the foundation for building intelligent solutions that connect information across the enterprise, improving business performance and delivering competitive advantage. Other updates and enhancements featured in Nuxeo 10.2 include:
- Federation Provider — With the new release, the Nuxeo platform can now manage binary content “in place.” In addition to extending the Nuxeo content federation strategy, this enables customers to get all the benefits of a modern content services platform (scale, search, workflows, automation, and permissions) without the cost and pain of forced migrations.
- Metadata Comparison — Nuxeo’s web interface offers functionality for comparing metadata values across multiple documents. Accuracy and speed are critical when users must clearly identify granular differences across data linked to different documents or versions of the same document, and the new capability allows users to review an entire document or just compare the differing metadata values.
- Similar Content — The Nuxeo platform now supports “more like this”-type queries, which enables intelligent searches across a repository for content that’s close to the content of a given image, document, case or other business object, a capability that is particularly useful in case management projects where finding similar cases can reduce resolution time.
- Bulk Actions Framework — Nuxeo has also streamlined bulk operations with a Bulk Action Framework built on a Kafka-based streaming infrastructure. This framework allows customers to execute custom actions on millions or even billions of content items more easily, and in a scalable and robust manner, which is useful for enterprises that have high-availability solution requirements or specific needs around bulk or volume processing of content or data.
- Avro — And finally, Nuxeo Stream can send asynchronous processing messages in Kafka using Avro, a standardized way of enabling modern systems to communicate with each other. This allows any service to consume Nuxeo messages in a standardized manner.
Q: The latest release of the Nuxeo Platform also features a new Adobe Creative Cloud connector. Is this something that has been requested by Nuxeo users?
A: Yes, we received very constructive feedback from our user community – particularly those who are Adobe CC subscribers – seeking a solution like our new Adobe Creative Cloud connector. They asked, and we listened. In addition to the features listed above, Fast Track 10.2 also features a new Adobe Creative Cloud connector, which has been rebuilt from the ground up to improve the user experience and leverage the capabilities of Adobe CC 2018.
Q: When introducing new features to your Content Services Platform, what factors does Nuxeo typically consider?
A: We start with recognition of one over-arching factor: the information management challenges faced by organizations today are both real and sizeable—and cannot be solved by legacy technologies or mindsets. We know that the path to digital transformation is a windy one, so we develop new CSP features with the ideal that the first step must be modernization of the information management toolkit within an organization. Why? That foundation is essential to success in the latter stages of the journey. Solving the information challenges faced by modern organizations requires a modern solution, and so we develop new features by factoring in the following requirements for today’s CSP:
1. Modern
New features must reflect the reality that a CSP is a central part of the modern information management toolkit. In addition, new features must help the CSP natively and effectively manage all of the data and content types that we use today—video, audio, social media, etc.— not just scanned documents and word files. And finally, we think about how the CSP needs to do all of this for billions of items. In short—all new features should help a CSP address the challenges of Big Content.
2. Connected
Legacy ECM solutions were designed to be insular—they were sold as the “one place to store all of your content.” Because CSPs take a very different approach, we look for features that support the ability to store data and content locally (in their own repository). Modern CSPs like Nuxeo can connect to other information sources within the business. This federated content services approach means that they can access content stored in an old ECM system, data stored in a legacy accounting application, or a regular file system—all from a single platform. This is key and provides users with a single hub to go to when storing and retrieving information across the enterprise.
3. Personalized
The modern and connected aspects of a CSP are all about IT and the business— making sure the system scales and connects systems together. The final element brings the benefit of all of this behind the scenes work to the end user—via personalization. So, new features should allow users to store, view, edit, and interact with data and content however they want to. That could be via the CSP interface, but equally it could be via a mobile app, a productivity app (such as MS Outlook), a line of business app like Salesforce, a web portal, or even a custom-built application to perform a specific task or process for the business.
This personalization capability changes the dynamic of how users interact with information. In the past, the user has had to adapt how they work to find and interact with information. Now the system can be tailored (better yet, personalized) to the exact requirements of the individual end users—and that is massively powerful.
We develop new features with the idea of putting these three pieces together—modern, connected, and personalized—to create an intelligent, scalable, and flexible platform that improves the customer experience, drives productivity, and has a positive effect on the bottom line. And with that in place, the journey towards information management modernization, and ultimately digital transformation, can begin.
Q: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies are all the rage these days. How is Nuxeo incorporating these technologies in Content Services?
A: Nuxeo has been using AI with our platform for well over a year now. We are in what I view as the second phase of AI adoption and delivery.
Our first phase began with AI technologies like Google Vision and Amazon Rekognition. Using these algorithms we have been able to “tag” documents, images, and videos loaded into the Nuxeo platform. This has been valuable, especially for our digital asset management customers, because it automates the process for loading new content assets into Nuxeo. Machine learning technologies do a much more thorough job of “understanding” and describing content than users typically do. And that can make content and assets easier to find and reuse in the future.
In phase two, we have been focused on domain specific metadata extraction and enrichment. One of the key challenges of content management has always been that it can be very labor intensive to add content to a content management system. So, we are using third-party AI technologies, along with our own proprietary models, to create a trainable engine for metadata extraction – based on training specific to a particular domain or knowledge set. For example, identifying a red truck is very useful for a generic tool, but know the make and model, among other things, is essential for an automobile manufacturer or a police force. This level of detail can be introduced to the model by training it with a much more specific, domain knowledge training set, By being able to accurately identify and apply rich, specific metadata to content, we can both automate the process by which new content is added to the system as well as greatly enrich the metadata for existing content. This is true in both our system or in other systems that we connect to and federate.
We also have begun to experiment with natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis, which we think can be incredibly valuable for case and correspondence management.
However, our industry is only in the early phases with AI. Here at Nuxeo, we envision a world in which users won’t have to manually add content to a content management system. We envision a world in which critical content and vital corporate records will be identified automatically and will be curated appropriately. We also envision a world in which content management systems understand your role, your preferences, and what information you need to be effective. And that information will be delivered to you when you need it and how you need it. We also envision that learning business processes will begin to intelligently adapt to changing circumstances and learn to automate routine actions and decisions.
In short, we envision a future where knowledge workers are freed from routine and manual activities, and can focus on more vital and transformational activities.
Q: What does the future hold for Nuxeo and your clients? Any new offerings or developments your customers should look forward to?
A: The Nuxeo product and engineering teams have been working hard on the next Fast Track release (FT 10.3) and on our next annual LTS release. Currently, we plan to release Fast Track 10.3 this December.
In FT 10.3, we’re making enhancement and improvements in the following areas:
- Leveraging the new bulk action framework for deletion, automation, and CSV export.
- Leveraging new AI infrastructure that allows seamless mixing of Cloud AI APIs providers and custom models trained with custom data (especially for the use case of metadata value suggestion).
- Including additional features that were missing in the Web UI port, such as the ability to have discussions about the documents and the CSV export.
Our next annual product release will be called “LTS 2019.” We understand that many in the Nuxeo community were expecting this release to be called “LTS 2018,” but considering we’re releasing this in 2019, we felt this product name update was a good idea. LTS 2019 will be released within the Nuxeo community in early January, and the current target date for our public announcement is January 2019. This fits our natural engineering cycle so well that we’ve decided we’ll stick to this calendar cycle in the coming years for future LTS releases.
We expect it to be very easy to migrate to the new LTS. Especially since there was no major change on the UI side – we stayed in Polymer 2 to enable easy migration.
About Nuxeo
Founded in 2008 and based out of New York, Nuxeo offers a leading cloud-native content services platform that is reinventing the way content management is used by today’s businesses. The company develops new ways to manage content and change the way people interact with digital information of all types and sizes. The company has a wide range of clients and customers in many different verticals (Boeing, Verizon, Electronic Arts, etc.), and continues to pursue the latest technologies and methodologies in order to meet customer needs and challenges.