Business benefits: The FileNet content repository provides a standard solution for document creation, versioning, and check-out, or add and check-in. The FileNet content repository can house all documents in a central repository with accessibility for all authorized users.

Recommendations: Use repositories to separate business objects based on functional and logical purposes, enforce object security, and improve the manageability of objects. For example, you can create a repository for sensitive Human Resources objects, a second repository for customer-related objects, and a third repository for vendor-related objects.

Business benefits: Folders provide an option to organize and structure documents and custom objects in logical entities. For example, you can create a loan folder that contains all the relevant business objects of a loan application.

Recommendations: When you use folders, be aware of the following design considerations that might affect overall system performance: •The number of folders •The depth of a folder structure •The number of objects in a folder •Folder items with the same name in the same folder because this duplication violates a uniqueness constraint.

Recommendations: Use custom objects to store data that relates to your business requirements, for example, a client can be represented as a custom object.

Business benefits: Document classes support transparent business functionality and can automatically file the document in the correct folder and apply the correct retention schedule.

Recommendations: Define a top-level document class with all the properties that are common across all objects in the enterprise. All specific application objects are children of the enterprise document class.

Business benefits: A version series retains all history of the content and supports the correct information management.

Recommendations: Define security on versions in order to ensure that only authorized users can access “work in progress” versions or completed versions.

Business benefits: Auditing helps you monitor content and process management for the following activities and regulatory compliance: •Object creation •Updates •Deletions

Recommendations: Only enable auditing for selected events and plan for audit log cleanup. Audit logs are stored in a database table and a large audit log table can create performance issues.

Business benefits: Using the model where document privileges are assigned from Directory Services functional groups, not individual users, helps reduce the cost of managing the security of the system by reducing security access complexity and by handling the separation of duty requirements. Marking sets allow access to a document to be controlled based on specific property values to ensure that sensitive information is protected, for example, Secret/Confidential. With marking sets, you ensure document security and privacy control, limit access to sensitive data, and control access to documents.

Recommendations: Always assign security to LDAP groups and not to specific LDAP users. Assigning rights to groups gives you more flexibility over object access. (You can easily add or remove users to the specific group, therefore giving or removing access to objects that are already stored.) Try to avoid the Deny security option on objects, which is an implicit way to remove access from users or groups. Marking sets are stored in the global configuration database (GCD). If you add too many of them, it might affect the performance of the system.

Business benefits: Content Platform Engine search capabilities provide an effective means of locating information, improving the ability to share information across the organization, and enhancing record requests, thus improving organizational efficiency.

Recommendations: Always specify maximum limit for returned results. Searches are translated as queries against object store databases. Long running, non-optimized queries negatively affect the overall system performance. Do not use wildcard searches because they can create problems, such as database table locks, and performance issues. Search is not a reporting tool and you must not use it that way.

Business benefits: The P8 Content Manager APIs provide a way to integrate with other line of business applications, improve the user experience by offering functionality, and access multiple systems transparently.

Business benefits: Content Manager storage management provides many options to satisfy every functional and technical requirement.

Recommendations: Encrypt all the sensitive content of your organization to ensure privacy. Encryption is defined on the storage area level. Enabling the encryption on a storage area does not encrypt the content that is already stored in that storage area. If your organization is geographically dispersed, use content caching and minimize the network traffic for content retrieval. If you are using hierarchical storage devices with tape support, such as IBM IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, consider using the content caching capability for slow content retrieval from tapes. Using content caching, the retrieval might time out but the content cache continues to retrieve the content so that the content is available in cache for the next user request. If you are using records management, be careful with the content deduplication feature of Content Manager.

Business benefits: Implementing a retention management scheme helps organizations meet organizational, business, regulatory, and legislative requirements.

Recommendations: Always define a retention period for the content that is considered critical for your organization. Retention periods that are defined on Content Manager need to match the retention period of your records management requirements. Also, by defining a retention period, you can decrease the volume of information on your Content Manager repository and provide only relevant information to the business users of your ECM system.

Recommendations: For casual users who use only Microsoft Office content, consider this feature of Content Manager as your primary option.

Business benefits: Content Ingestion tools help make the collection of data easy and quick. They simplify information search and can automatically extract data from documents during the ingestion process. Using the content ingestion tools indexing process can be standardized, simplified, and independent of the organizational changes.

Business benefits: Subscriptions can streamline the business process and make all integration transparent to the business user.

Recommendations: Subscriptions provide a powerful way to activate your content. You can define a subscription so that a workflow is launched when a document is created or modified. For example, when a loan application document is created, a loan approval workflow is initiated, a loan folder is created, the client information is retrieved from core systems, and a custom object is created with the information.

Business benefit: Ability for a group of people to work on the same document with proper version control and avoid duplication, providing real-time collaboration and information sharing to improve and streamline business processes.

Recommendations: For simple serial workflows, use content lifecycle management.

Recommendations: For complex content-centric processes, use the process management capabilities of Content Manager. Examples of content-centric processes are loan origination processes and insurance claim processes. Using Content Manager process management, you can activate the organizational content and take control over processes that involve documents.

Recommendations: Try to use the embedded Content Manager Viewer as much as possible. It provides multiple views of the content according to user preference and IT permission sets and it ensures security. It makes the ECM experience positive and transparent to the users by solving issues such as where and how to store documents.