Integration with external content repositories

IBM® FileNet Content Federation Services enables you to integrate data in an external repository with FileNet P8 and access the documents as though they are stored in an object store. An external repository acts like a virtual storage area for the Content Platform Engine system.

Content Federation Services creates a reference within an object store that points to the source document in an external repository. The document in the object store is represented by metadata only; the document in the external repository contains all its original content. In addition, Content Federation Services provides a mechanism for mapping source document metadata to Content Platform Engine document properties.

The process of creating a Content Platform Engine document that references a document in an external repository and mapping the source document metadata to Content Platform Engine document properties is called federation. No changes are made to either the content or the metadata at federation. The federation process is managed by sets of rules and data mappings that define what information to retrieve, when to federate documents, and how to map metadata information from the source document to document property values in Content Platform Engine.

After documents have been federated, they can be used with all the standard FileNet P8 functionality, including property searches, records management, and workflows. Metadata updates and new documents or versions that occur in the source repository are propagated to the object store. If the object store is configured for full-text indexing, the content of text-based federated documents is indexed so that text-based searches can locate the documents.

An integral part of the records management process is ensuring that documents that have been declared as records are not deleted until the time specified by the records management disposition schedule. You can use IBM Enterprise Records with federated documents; after a document is declared a record, it is automatically locked down so that the content of the existing version can be deleted only by the IBM Enterprise Records application. 

Other Content Federation Services capabilities include failover, failure recovery, duplicate detection, federation of external repository updates, federation of documents with version series, and storage of general configuration information. Content Federation Services can be configured for high availability environments.