Enterprise features
From Sense/Net 6.0 Wiki
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[edit] Document management
[edit] The classic approach: File servers
The concept behind file servers is quite self-explanatory: users can store and access files on a central server. The structure of folders and documents is created and regularly modified by users, which, without proper attention and carefully defined policies, may result in chaos. Even best-laid schemes and policies for categorizing documents and data through the use of folders can become the source of much confusion in the case of even minor errors, with related information stored separately, growing redundancy through duplicate files, and unrelated information grouped together for irrelevant reasons.
As file servers provide no built-in version management solution, tracking the changes of constantly updated documents can also become a hassle and a source of confusion. And with file servers, even the best versioning policy depends on the education and discipline of users, as changes aren't tracked – you have no way to know who accessed a file and what changes she made. Moreover, if a file is deleted, it's gone for good, as file servers usually don't provide "trash bin" functionality or reliable undeletes.
[edit] Enterprise portals: Document repositories
The document management functions of an Enterprise Portal enable users to manage documents through a web interface. Using an Enterprise Portal, partners or teleworkers can access documents remotely through the Internet in a secure way.
Enterprise Portals also provide built-in support for versioning and a central permission management system. Well-defined workspaces make structuring the corporate data more self-explanatory and simple.
The ability to categorize documents in a coherent fashion can help users to find relevant information easily, and keep related pieces of information together in a semantical sense.
[edit] Easy document management using the Content Explorer of Sense/Net 6.0
Have you ever tried to reach a document or a folder deeply buried beneath countless layers of an incoherent structure on a system you were unfamiliar with? This is what you will never experience while working with Sense/Net 6.0, thanks to our Content Explorer, which follows the intuitive look-and-feel conventions set by Microsoft’s Windows Explorer.
Basically, Content Explorer is a backend management system in which you or your IT professionals will handle most tasks pertaining to the portal's operation and management. Its graphical user interface was optimized for working with contents of various types, organized in a hierarchical folder structure.
Beside viewing and organizing, the Content Explorer also provides an easy way to edit Contents in a simple and quick way.
[edit] Search
Running in-depth searches on file servers can be extremely slow. Searches take up both server and client resources, negatively impacting the performance of other processes and services. Seeking through a mass of data larger than a few gigabytes will always result in a long and significant decrease in speed. Consider that even in the case of smaller enterprises, the mass of accumulated data will most likely total several tens, if not hundreds of gigabytes.
In addition, enterprises tend to use use intranet servers, internal systems of shared folders, multiple document management systems and local hard drives simultaneously to store important documents. It isn't hard to understand how this can make searching for a specific piece of information particularly difficult and painful.
One of the most sought-after functionalities in an organizational environment is a quick search service. The Google™ web search can provide millions of hits for a search word in terms of seconds, while seeking through an enterprise file server might take several minutes.
Using an ECMS provides a simple solution for this problem through indexing, and delegating search requests to the database servers optimized for running queries quickly and efficiently. Searches in an Enterprise Content Repository requires no client resources at all, and significantly less server resources (and eventually, less wear to hardware) than the scouring of a file server.
In Sense/Net 6.0, unstructured full text searches inside documents such as HTML pages, Microsoft Word or Excel documents, source code files, etc., and structured metadata-based filtering (eg. by name, type, modification or access dates, owner, etc.) are integrated into a single intelligent search engine, enabling users to find anything within the Repository in a matter of seconds.
[edit] Teamwork support
Coordinating complex work processes over file servers can easily become a hassle, as such systems do not provide the functionality needed for teamwork, meaning two or more people collaborating on the same set of documents.
Imagine a scenario when a document, eg. a contract draft is under preparation and various colleagues make corrections or post comments to it. Safe coordination of such processes requires versioning support.
In Sense/Net 6.0, only one person can work on a document at a given time. Documents can be opened for reading or checked out for modification through the document store. Upon storing the modification (check-in) the system saves the modified document, but the original version is also stored for possible rollbacks.
[edit] Collaborative Workspaces
The most recent improvement in Sense/Net 6.0 is the introduction of Collaborative Workspaces. A Workspace is basically a mini-portal for a certain project. You can think of it as the digital equivalent of an open space your project team can share for short conversations, planning and coffee breaks.
Your employees and external stakeholders now share a single, user-friendly ground to store and share files and documents, manage their time and project deadlines, access and update notes, write a project blog to inform management and co-workers of their progress, and access all vital data pertaining to the project at a glance.
Using Workspaces is both efficient and fun. No longer will lost e-mails and bad communication plague your organization.
[edit] Authentication and Authorization
[edit] Authentication: Identity Management System (IMS)
Identity Management means making sure that every user of the system is who he says he is. In a classic scenario, only internal users - or a subset of internal users - are kept track of, barring outside stakeholders such as clients or business partners to access the information relevant to them through the organization's internal IT infrastructure. Adding users to a file server usually means changes on a deep, operating system level, which can easily become a security risk.
The IMS of Sense/Net 6.0 provides a way for keeping track of users and groups of users inside and outside of the organization. Users can be added and managed through an intuitive web interface, thus human relations professionals and managers can handle user settings independently.
[edit] Authorization: Permissions
User identities and permissions for data access change often as a result of projects being born and finished daily, and of personal changes within the organization. Traditional directories are difficult to maintain, therefore a system administrator is needed to manage them. Over-complicated and centralized administration makes the management of permissions difficult, time-consuming, and often inaccurate.
Like file servers, portals provide administrators with a framework to set permissions on folders and files, so documents can only be accessed with appropriate access rights. The central permissions manager of Sense/Net 6.0 provides an easy-to-use interface for user management, with no requirements for specific IT knowledge.
Permissions can be set for both users or groups. To set permissions, you do not need system administrator rights – the owner of each folder can set permissions for it through a simple web interface.
[edit] Enterprise Infrastructure (EI)
All functions of the Sense/Net Content Repository are built around the Enterprise Infrastructure, ensuring that the system can scale reliably to serve even the largest of organizations. The EI provides for functionality necessary for large scale deployments: increased security, reliability, scalability and performance.
[edit] SmartBuilding and the Smart Application model
New in Sense/Net 6.0, we are proud to present you with the Smart Application model. While retaining all previously available functionality, our system now allows your IT professionals to easily define various presentational models for business information, significantly lowering portal building and maintenance overhead.
The first large-scale showcase for this new technology is our new Collaborative Workspace framework.
