EDRM systems and your IT infrastructure

An EDRM system should be seen as a new corporate application like a new finance system or student administration system. It should be selected to run on your existing IT infrastructure. In other words it should run on your desktop PC hardware and software and across your networks and on your preferred server hardware and software. It should interface with the software you use to create content/documents and your existing e-mail and messaging software and, as shown above, it should integrate with your existing business administration systems.

Issues to consider

Upgrades

The first issue to consider is whether there are any weaknesses in your current IT infrastructure which may cause problems when implementing an EDRM system. The most common problem which education organisations face is if they operate across multiple sites and buildings then the network connections to remote locations may not be sufficiently powerful - the bandwidth may be too low to support the regular transmission of large electronic files. Hence in stage three a thorough review of the existing IT infrastructure is needed including a network survey. If this identifies network problems then in stage six - the requirements stage - you either need to specify an enhancement to the network or the system implementation must take account of the problem by either employing a distributed solution where all the documents required by that location are held locally on a server at that location or by delaying roll out to that location. Other weaknesses may include poorly specified desktop computers which need to be upgraded or non standard or obsolete e-mail solutions which may also have to be replaced.

Web content management

You may have decided after reading stage one, step one above that your preferred option is to implement an EDRM solution comprising - document and data capture; EDM; ERM and perhaps BPM modules. The reason may be because you already have either an inhouse developed Web Content Management solution or a third party package which you have invested time and effort in implementing.

This is a perfectly reasonable approach but it does leave you with some integration issues which need to be considered in stage three and solutions specified in stage six. Most notably this option will result in at least two content repositories (EDRM and WCM) and you will need to consider how you want to search across both and how you will want to declare some of the content on the web sites to be records and how you will want those records to be managed. The preferred approach in the medium term would be for all records to be managed on the EDRM system.