Welcome to our Evolution of ECM Blog Series! Over the next couple months, we will take a close look at what a modern or next generation ECM software looks like, with a strong focus on Infor Document Management and Yoga Content, a couple of the leading options for this type of software.
Enterprise Content Management systems have come a long way over the past decade. Perceptive Content, OnBase, OpenText, DocuWare, and MHC are all now considered legacy on-premises software. They require time (or money) consuming integrations to whichever new cloud ERP you're looking to migrate to. Integrating a legacy ECM software with an ERP such as Infor Lawson S3, for example, requires Design Studio customizations to put a button or URL in to call it back to a web client. OnBase has an Application Enabler that dynamically retrieves documents based on the current screen. With all of these legacy softwares, you often have to go back and use a search or a document view to find the data you're looking for. Well, that all goes away with Infor Document Management. IDM has three main components: the document output, the storage and document management, and the document capture.
Here we are going to focus on the document management and capture pieces, and not so much the output portion. One of the most significant pre-configured storage features that IDM offers is out-of-the-box accommodation for document types. For most of your business transactions and business classes, IDM comes pre-configured with these document types and attributes. There is not a lot of required set up, yet it still features your typical, complete content management system, including access control and the ability to set up “related documents.” You can also customize additional attributes you may want to capture or even document type storage options.
The other cool feature that goes hand in hand with what we've been discussing is the IDM contextual viewer. This allows you to see documents within the context of their correlated transactions. In the Managed Invoice List View, for example, when you click on an invoice, it automatically pulls up the invoice image to the right of it. This also works on any of the drill-down screens related to invoices. If you're looking at a purchase order to drill down to the AP invoice transaction, you will see all of the related documents relevant to the entire check cycle within the context of your ERP.
This all means that you don't need to build anything special for these functionalities, or go outside to a third-party system, because it is all native within IDM. We consider this to be one of the biggest improvements Infor has provided in the ECM space because it's part of the Infor OS platform. It has full lifecycle management alongside the transactions, so as you're archiving transactions out of Infor, you're also archiving the images.
Please tune in next week as we dive deeper into Infor FSM & IDM.
