Enterprise Content Management: Adapting to the Needs of Developers

With ever-decreasing budgets for IT departments, new and innovative solutions are needed to increase productivity with fewer resources. Managers are finding that integration of business processes is becoming increasingly important. One solution would be the consolidation of enterprise infrastructure and related operations. Enterprise content management (ECM) systems provide content library services that parallel those required for source code management systems. This parallel would provide a unique opportunity for consolidating the two systems. In the broad sense, source code is content. By capitalizing on the built-in library services of ECM systems to manage source code, an organization could reduce redundant infrastructure, training, and support costs.

The Challenge

While ECM systems provide basic library management features, they do not offer the advanced library and build management functionality required of a source code management system. Organizations store their source code outside of their enterprise content management system (ECM) in separate systems with their own hardware, software, administration, training, and support cost centers. Often organizations have multiple source code systems deployed in separate departments or even on separate projects within one department.

A Unified Solution

By implementing a single source code and content repository, an enterprise-wide commonality could fulfill diverse department needs. Storing the two together could allow for:

• Sharing existing hardware infrastructure already allocated to enterprise content management.
• Eliminating redundant support and maintenance operations by migrating disparate source code systems into a single application. The following support and maintenance activities could be consolidated:
  o Backup and Recovery
  o Administration Support for Development Teams
  o Training
  o Security Policy Administration
  o Upgrades
• Increasing efficiency in source code management processes by using well known features common in ECM applications such as check in, check out, versioning, lifecycle, and workflow.
• Standardizing business process management and regulatory needs.

A Parallel Process

Just storing content and source code together would not be enough to yield great business benefit. As mentioned, source code requires a greater variety of library and build management functionality. Though the two follow the same deployment lifecycle, approval and development require different steps. For example, source code includes stages such as Coded, Tested, and Live, while content includes stages such as Work In Progress (WIP), Staging, and Active. Notice the parallel, yet different process steps. By enhancing the ECM functionality, source code could use the same process for its lifecycle.

IT departments maintain source code in a source code management system, for example VSS, CVS, or ClearCase. At the same time, content, including graphics and text, is maintained in a separate ECM system. The lack of coordination between source code and content results in a tedious deployment lifecycle because of the challenge in merging the two.

Clearly, integrating the progression of content and source code could greatly benefit the deployment lifecycle. This unification could streamline the progression of development to production.

Promoting Collaboration

In order to successfully share and manage source code and content together, collaboration between all roles in the development lifecycle would need to take place.

Workflows could manage the progression of source code through its lifecycle, helping enforce collaboration. Organizations could use workflows to manage portions of the development lifecycle, such as the code review process. For example, managing the code review process through a workflow would ensure that source code is sent through an approved peer review process. Comments made by reviewers in the workflow could be sent back to the author who could make the appropriate modifications, or each reviewer could simply accept the code without changes. Once all reviewers accept the code as correct, the code review process would be considered complete.

In Summary

It is time for the business world to begin consolidating source code and content into unified repositories. As discussed, there is a need to manage both source code and content lifecycles together. This convergence would allow a corporation to:

• Leverage and ECM system’s infrastructure by building an application onto it.
• Remove redundant tools, operations, and processes by retiring existing source code management system deployments.
• Reduce the learning curve by using common enterprise content management interface conventions for source code management.

A source code management solution built on an ECM platform would address not only core source code management needs, but would also provide the natural integration to the content that the code supports. This consolidation would lowers costs, gain productivity, and enable deployment of content rich applications, key factors in any corporation interested in the efficiency of consolidating resources.