Understand Business Asset Repositories

Every organization generates large amounts of documents and information. Even small and medium organizations may need to process tens of thousands of new documents a month. Large businesses often generate millions of documents monthly. Managing these business assets effectively means being able to efficiently capture, validate, route, and organize your business documents so you can find what you need when you need it. Let’s look at some of the Oracle Content Management features available to streamline the document management process.

Oracle Content Management allows business users to manage business assets in one or more business asset repositories. A business asset repository is a storage location for back-office and transactional business assets. A business asset can be a business document, such as an invoice or contract, or structured content in the form of a content item, such as an employee record or supplier data.

As a repository administrator, you create asset types that mirror your business, based on the kind of content you want to store in your repositories, along with the required metadata for each asset type. You can then associate these asset types with repositories. You can also assign taxonomies to a repository to allow users to categorize assets.

Combinations of taxonomy categories and asset types can be used to apply granular security to a repository in order to ensure only authorized users with the appropriate security clearance level can access confidential documents. You can also use granular security to control who can manage, contribute, or view business documents in each repository.

Business asset repositories are designed to manage content securely. Therefore, business assets can't be published to publishing channels. However, they can still be surfaced in secure websites and headless experiences by querying lists of assets dynamically via the API or by leveraging the Embed UI to show a filtered view of the repository directly inside web applications.

You can create multiple repositories to handle your different business needs. For example:

You could set up one repository to support employee records and data. Assign asset types to the repository to collect documents such as employee resumes, hiring documents, benefit forms, and payslips. Create content types to collect information such as employee data or vacation requests. Add workflows to the repository to streamline processes such as hiring or reviews.
Set up another repository to support customer contracts and invoices. Assign asset types with custom attributes to support legal or tax requirements. To allow asset categorization for individual products or customers, assign taxonomies that represent your product hierarchy or industries, as applicable for your business. To help contributors categorize assets or simply find relevant business documents, enable the smart content feature on the repository.
Your organization may work with external suppliers who provide product images and documentation. You could set up a repository for collaboration with these suppliers. Assign content connectors for Google Drive, OneDrive, or other third-party content providers, allowing the suppliers to upload business assets from these external repositories.

Let's use an Employee repository as an example to guide you through the setup of a business asset repository to manage all your employee records and documents. Here's the process you could use to create the required dependencies and get your repository set up:

Asset Types

Your employee repository will include employee records (with data such as contact information and start date) and documents such as PDF files of the employee's resume and payslips. In Oracle Content Management this content will be represented as assets of one of two types:
- Content type which defines the structure of data that a content item can store. To store information about the employees, define an Employee Record content type with a text field Name for the employee's name, a text field Job Title for the job title, a date field Start Date for the date the employee was hired to start, a reference field Resume to reference the employee's uploaded resume, and other fields for employee contact information and such. You could also create content types for vacation requests or time cards.
- Digital asset type which defines the file types that a business document can store and the structure of attributes (metadata) to describe the document. Use the out-of-the-box File type to manage PDF documents for documents such as resumes or W4 forms; or, define custom digital asset types. For example, define an Employee Payslip digital asset type with a reference field Employee to reference the employee record content item and a date attribute Payslip Date.
Then assign all these asset types to the Employee repository, allowing repository members with the Manager or Contributor role to:
- Create content items from the Employee Record content types.
- Upload resumes to create business documents from the File type, which can then be referenced in the Resume field in content items created from the Employee Record content type.
- Upload a batch of payslips using the Employee Payslip digital asset type, which can then be linked to Employee Record content items.
Remember, contributors will be limited to uploading only those file types specified in the digital asset types that are associated with the repository.
Taxonomies

Employees might be organized into categories based on their department, manager, location, or job level to help managers or human resources find the information they need. For example, a human resources representative might need to find all employees in a certain building to notify them of upcoming renovations.

To facilitate filtering and searching assets in the taxonomy, Oracle Content Management enables you to define relevant taxonomies, assign them to the repository, and then use them for asset categorization. You create a taxonomy by defining a vocabulary of business terms, arranged into a hierarchy of categories that represent how content across your organization is defined and classified. For example, you could define taxonomies for your job levels, departments, and geographical regions where your organization operates, or any other hierarchy of subject categories that is relevant for your organization.

After you assign taxonomies to a repository, repository members can categorize assets, either when adding them to the repository or at a later time. A faceted search user interface allows filtering assets by categories in one taxonomy or across several taxonomies to find relevant content.
Repositories

After your asset types and taxonomies are defined, create the repository and associate the objects you created with the repository.

That completes basic set-up. At this point, your repository is ready for use. Optionally, you can enable additional capabilities on your repository to provide contributors with tools that make content capture, creation, and approval more efficient or to allow you, as repository manager, to govern the content before it's ready for use:

Content Capture

Use Content Capture to capture hard copy and electronic documents, applying tags, categories, and metadata to create assets in your repository. Use native capture tools to quickly upload and index content—such as forms, purchase orders, contracts, receipts, or invoices—from a variety of sources, including scanners, emails, and network file shares. Smart content capabilities eliminate manual effort needed to tag and categorize assets. With optical character recognition, your scanned content is converted into fully indexed and searchable content. Advanced search capabilities, such as custom relevancy, auto suggestions, stemming, spelling, and synonyms, make it faster and easier to find the content you need. When extracting metadata, Oracle’s trained engine recognizes different types of documents and forms to capture pertinent information. Use workflows for multi-step content validation and approval processes to improve data accuracy.
Content Connectors

If your organization uses external cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive for sharing digital assets with external design agencies, you can register a content connector for the relevant storage service with Oracle Content Management, and then assign the content connector to the repository, so that contributors can easily add files to the repository directly from the external cloud storage.
Smart Content

You can help contributors find relevant documents in search, add relevant documents to content items, or categorize assets with taxonomies by enabling the Smart Content feature on a repository. When you do so, all documents added to the repository and all content items created in the repository are processed by built-in artificial intelligence and natural language processing services, auto-tagging them accordingly and extracting keywords from the text.
Workflows

Typically content requires review and approval by peers or managers before being finalized. By default, Oracle Content Management enables contributors to submit assets for review by repository managers. If your organization requires content to be reviewed in a multi-step workflow by piers, technical editors, managers, compliance, or your legal team, you can register your Oracle Integration processes with Oracle Content Management, and then assign them to a repository. Then contributors can submit assets for review through a relevant workflow. Workflow participants receive notification when a task is assigned to them and can take actions on the assets as per the role that is assigned to them in the workflow.

Archiving Assets

At some point you may have assets that aren't currently being used, but you're not ready delete them yet. You can archive those assets. Archived assets are billed at 1/200th the cost of normal assets.

Permissions and Roles

To access the content management user interface (Content under Administration in the left navigation menu), you must be assigned the Enterprise User role and have one of the following administrator roles:

Content Administrator—this role allows you to create asset types and taxonomies.
Repository Administrator—this role allows you to create asset repositories and to register workflows.

Here's what you need to know about who can see or interact with different content management objects:

Assets area—The Assets area is only available to enterprise users.
Repositories—When you create a repository, you're assigned the Manager role on it which allows you to edit repository settings and membership. You can add other administrators to the repository as Managers to allow them to manage the repository. You can add other enterprise users to the repository as Contributors to allow them to add assets to the repository or as Viewers to view assets in the repository.
Asset types—When you create an asset type, you're assigned the Manager role on it which allows you to edit the asset type and membership. You can add other administrators to the asset type as Managers to allow them to manage the asset type. Asset types can be used to create assets in the associated repository by any repository member with at least Contributor role on the repository.
Taxonomies—When you create a taxonomy, it's created in a draft state. To allow users to categorize assets with the taxonomy, you have to promote it, and then add it to a repository.