CASE STUDY
Increasing Government Mobile Productivity
COMPANY
Large Government Agency
TECHNOLOGIES
SOLUTION
- Zia ECM Assessment and Implementation Methodology
RESULTS
- Implemented storage and retrieval of documents and metadata in Alfresco repository by exposing document management functionality as service endpoints of a MuleSoft Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) orchestration layer
- Provided designs for document locking and transformation, electronic signatures
- Provided disaster recovery planning and high availability recommendations for document management sub-system of the initiative
- Developed comprehensive Alfresco installation and cluster set-up scripts to simplify deployments for system administrators
The Company
This agency provides technical and financial assistance to owners and operators of private property for the purpose of conserving natural resources on their land. There are approximately 11,000 employees in 2,800 field offices nationwide.
The Situation
The initiative was started in 2009 with the aim of replacing the existing applications used by field agents to manage customers and plans. Their application is designed to enable field agents to spend less time in the office and more time in the field.
Alfresco is a sub-system of the application and is used to manage documents relating to customers and their associated conservation plans.
The goal for the sub-system was to provide robust and scalable document management capability that could be leveraged among all of the other subsystems within the solution.
In order to make this possible, Alfresco was exposed as service endpoint via a MuleSoft ESB.
The Solution
Zia Consulting contracted with the agency to provide enterprise content management (ECM) expertise (and Alfresco consulting in particular) as needed for the delivery of the pilot. Zia was responsible for a number of recommendations, analyses, and proofs-of-concept, including:
- Analysis of options for failover/disaster recovery
- Scaling recommendations and proofs-of-concept
- Content modeling for the pilot
- Intelligent document capture capabilities demonstration (Ephesoft)
- Features and capability comparison of various ECM products
- Alfresco monitoring recommendations
Zia entered into a two-week agreement to assess the project’s requirements with regard to content management and to deliver an assessment document which captured the Zia understanding of current Alfresco requirements. This also provided as many recommendations as possible based on this understanding and limited timeframe.
Following the assessment, Zia entered into two separate implementation phases. The first phase implemented Alfresco, providing the following capabilities: store documents, store metadata properties for documents, control document versions, manage relationships between documents, update documents and document metadata, delete documents, automatically extract document metadata, and search for documents using the defined metadata properties.
In addition to providing these capabilities, Zia implemented a connection to Alfresco using a MuleSoft ESB through standardized web service application programmer interfaces (API).
The second implementation phase built upon the work done in phase one by providing recommendations for high availability, disaster recovery, and document ingestion. The document ingestion included implementing document locking and transformation and providing electronic signature capabilities.
The Results
All field agents within the organization are now utilizing the application with Alfresco ECM to manage customer documents.