Section - 4 : Planning
Before implementing the Oracle Documaker Connector, there are a few planning steps that need to be completed. You need these answers to configure Documaker, WebCenter Content, and Documaker Connector.
Thinking through and making these decisions up front will make the implementation process go much more smoothly. You will want to involve all stakeholders in the implementation, particularly those who will access the documents from the content management system.
You should consider several questions and make sure everyone is in agreement and understands the implications of the decisions. This implementation and any subsequent changes will flow through the entire process. Resolve these questions before you implement the system:
- Which documents will be archived?
- Which output format, such as PDF, will be sent to the content management system?
- What variable fields will be used to organize and retrieve the documents? These fields contain the metadata used to index the documents into the content management system.
Define the Content
First decide which of your documents you want to save in the archive. You may be publishing several versions of the same basic document, such as different recipient copies.
There may not be any reason to archive multiple versions of the same document. On the other hand, if you have multiple uses for the archived documents, possibly with different end users of the documents, you may find it convenient.
For example, you may want to archive a master copy for customer service to reference with both customer and internal forms included, but you may also want to serve documents to a customer web portal where they can retrieve only the forms visible to them in their final document. Another example might include a utility billing application which serves individual customers copies of their bill with additional marketing or usage analysis pages, but also archives a ledger copy that includes only the current period financial data for use in customer service or accounting.
Define the Format
Next, for those documents, you must decide what output format you want to send to the content management system. This should be a format which your end users can retrieve and view easily. It must also be a format which supports all anticipated uses of the documents you are archiving.
A popular choice is Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF). It is a cross-industry standard format that provides high fidelity output, cross-platform support, and is universally viewable. Documaker can produce these types of PDF files:
- Text PDF files, where the text in the documents is searchable and can be set to allow copying to other documents.
- Image PDF files, which can be generated by print to disk processes or document conversion using a printer metaphor. These PDF documents contain images or pictures of the pages, similar to scanned documents. They are generally much larger and less useful than text PDF documents.
Determine How You Will Retrieve the Documents
Finally, you must define the information users will use to search for the documents they want. Remember, this is data your content management system users will have on hand to use to search for the documents they want to retrieve. This is generally a subset of the variable data published on the documents. Here are some examples:
- Customer/account number or ID
- Customer name
- Date of issue
- Telephone number
- Postal code
This data is called metadata, meaning data about your data — in this case, data about your documents. It must be saved into a database table which you customize, so it can be read directly from there by the Documaker Source. Writing these database records is done by a Document Automation Language (DAL) script, which you create. Each row in the table represents a document to be archived and contains the metadata by which it will be indexed in the content management system.
To design the target layout for your metadata, you need to understand the options available in your content management system for placement of this data. This also helps you understand how to configure Documaker Connector for your destination content management system, since the options available in each system influence the way the destination is configured and how the data coming out of Documaker is mapped.
For example, some content management systems keep all the metadata together with the documents themselves and store documents in a rather flat structure. Other systems let you create one or more levels of folders to collect and organize documents for the users. These folders can have metadata attached to them (sometimes called properties) in some systems which may or may not be the same as the document metadata. Depending on the destination system, you can map your metadata to document or folder attributes, or some other container or object in your content management system.
Using Oracle WebCenter Content
Basic metadata fields are preconfigured in the WebCenter Content server database and you cannot edit them. The basic fields built into the system include:
| Content ID | Title | Author |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Security Group | Revision |
| ID | Check In Date | Indexed Date |
| Release Date | Expiration Date | Checked out |
| Checked out by | Revision Status | Indexer Status |
| Conversion Status | Indexer Cycle | Workflow State |
| Revision Rank | Publish Type | Publish Status |
Folders are an optional feature of WebCenter Content. When the feature is installed/enabled folder objects have the same set of basic metadata and additional fields are added to both documents and folders. For example, a Folder field is added to each document to hold the parent folder ID if the document is in a folder.
Custom metadata is added in a single screen in the Content Server’s Configuration Manager application. They are called information fields. When fields are added to this list, they become attributes of all documents and folders.