Objective Corporation is seeking to democratise enterprise content management, with its latest release ‘ECM 8’ providing everyday users with the tools to search, read and contribute content via an Internet browser.

ECM 8 has also been beefed up to a full 64 bit architecture, and firmly embeds enterprise search capability from French company Exalead.

“From extensive field testing we believe we’ve set the benchmark in our quest to deliver a zero-training ECM user experience and importantly, one which is also engaging to use.” said Tony Walls, CEO Objective Corporation.

Objective Executive is a new browser based interface that is designed to broaden the use of ECM beyond content specialists to standard users who just want intermittent access to information.

It is able to be used on a variety of mobile devices and provides access to documents and folders; a simple “one-field” search facility, and drag and drop addition of documents to the ECM repository. It also allows local editing and publishing and keeps track of changes.

The traditional thick client is still required by those needing access to complex functions, e.g. information managers and document administrators.

“Objective Executive will enable substantially faster user adoption of ECM throughout an organisation, which in our experience is the key success factor for enterprise information and content management,” said Walls.

A browser client introduced with previous versions of Objective ECM, known as Objective Portal, included a full set of ECM functionality. This presented an interface that was
considered too daunting for everyday users.

The Exalead CloudView platform for data-extraction, indexation, and text-analytics is now delivered as a core part of ECM 8, replacing the Verity search technology used previously by Objective.

Objective has added a new search option with ECM 8, known as Objective Discover, This is an additional product that introduces faceted search; the ability for users to conduct a familiar, Internet-style search, then further refine the search by applying filters for categories, content type or many other criteria based on the metadata and contents of the search results.

It can return results based on document title, metadata and document content. It can expose information that has always resided in the repository but may have been buried; highlighting for example search text frequency and use patterns or uncovering subject matter experts within an organisation.

Objective believes the accuracy and relevance of search results can be improved by uncovering these relationships, leading to better decision-making.

It promises faceted search will deliver results at speeds users expect from an Internet search experience.

Search results are also able to be subject to security, privacy and compliance restrictions that are required by government, defence and intelligence organisations.

ECM 8 provides support for 32-bit & 64-bit clients, and is backward compatible with the ECM 7.5 client