Developing ECM systems solutions

BA Insight helps its clients address their internal search challenges through a combination of modular, scalable software in conjunction with a high-level search engine and AI strategy. This allows their customers to implement various search solutions, resulting in more efficient, productive, and engaged employees.

BA Insight’s customers have a wide array of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions. Every day, their employees need to access these systems to find specific digital documents and the organization’s content. Often, users will have many different ECM platform systems, making it difficult and time-consuming to search each ECM solution for particular unstructured information.

BA Insight was looking for a qualified partner to develop connectors to the Enterprise Content Management system with features including retrieving information from various ECM systems, reading and processing data and making them securely searchable via a unified search index.

Softwarium leveraged the experience it received while designing the PathBuilder system, which connected more than 30 different Enterprise Content Management systems. Softwarium employees attended meetings between BA Insight and their clients to identify their exact needs and the ECMs they were looking to connect. Certain connectors had to be made from scratch, but others could be reused. In fact, throughout the project, Softwarium accumulated a comprehensive framework of connector components which allowed us to expedite the development process and add more predictability as to when the project will be complete.

If the customer already had a connector in place, we would have to evaluate which data could be indexed. Since the ECM system is very extendable, the clients always installed extensions to perform certain custom operations. Since creating a “one-size-fits-all” solution is impossible, we needed to check what we needed to add to the connector to maintain an uninterrupted flow of business processes.

Softwarium assembled a team of 15 people consisting of a Project Manager, Software Developers, QAs to allow BA Insight to take on new clients and create a custom connector for each of them.

As a result of BA Insight’s long-term collaboration with Softwarium, they provided each ECM software client with a custom-made connector. We created connectors to LiveLink, FileNet, eRoom, IBM Websphere, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft SharePoint Online systems. In addition, we created a framework for automatic functional testing of connectors, which allowed, in its turn, to provide high-quality products and cut time for developing new connectors.