The Problem

Organizations have multiple applications and softwares in place which have been developed over the period during the lifetime of the organization. And after a while, the problem of not having a central repository of the content and knowledge becomes one of the major concerns of the CTO. Each of the applications stores content in different shape and form, and there is no standard means by which these contents can be gathered and aggregated.

And after a while a situation arises that content cannot be controlled and the overall knowledge of the organization starts to be lost. For knowledge and content centric organizations, this proves to be very important. For resolving such problems, many organizations opt for expensive solutions like SAP, Microsoft etc. But even then the old traditional applications running cannot be replaced easily.

The Solution

Dynamic Knowledge Repository of fusionKM looks for solving this problem. The knowledge repository (or content repository) stores the content and indexes the content. fusionKM is able to expose this knowledge and content as services. Services as REST, Web Services over HTTP, SOAP, WebDAV etc.

fusionKM Services Layer exposes and controls all the functionalities of these services along with managing the relevant transaction, security aspects. Since the services are exposed via standard HTTP protocol using REST API, any other application can consume the services in a true SOA based environment.

The Services Layer exposes many services including for -

1. Creating, Uploading Contents
2. Searching Contents, Federated Search, Context specific Search
3. Managing Users, Permissions
4. Business Process Management, Workflow, Tasks
5. Web 2.0 Collaboration such as Wiki, Blog, Forum etc
6. Social Networking
7. Taxonomy, Folksonomy
8. Version Control
9. CMIS
10. JSR Portlets
11. Import, Export

Any new application can be built using these services, or existing applications can be customized to use these services in order to become content centric. Thus the knowledge or content of the organization will be stored and managed in a single repository and a number of applications and devices can act a clients of the repository with minimal changes. In a way, the full content repository is exposed as services and ready to be consumed.

fusionKM Dynamic Content Repository also comes with one administrative console to manage and monitor the full repository.

Architecture

The fusionKM Dynamic Knowledge Repository is built as SOA. The core Knowledge Repository is hidden from the external applications. Applications would only use and connect via the services, and the service handlers would take care of the rest.

The Services are exposed by variety of standard and technology-independent protocols and connectors such as HTTP, REST, SOAP, FTP, WebDAV. Thus any applications from any technology would be able to connect to the repository using these protocols. Most of the portable devices also support these protocols, enabling those to access and connect to the repository.

Since the repository services are exposed via HTTP, depending on the deployment, the services can be accessed in the Intranet, Extranet, VPN or even in Internet.