Enterprises are drowning in content and working against the tide to get it published and shared effectively, so Acquia Inc. has launched a new SaaS platform for smoother sailing .
Today the Boston-based company unveiled Content Hub, a cloud-based distribution and discovery service, which allows organizations to create, search, distribute, and share content numerous websites, intranets, content management systems and other external distribution channels such as RSS and Apple News. It could be text-based information, or multimedia such as photo and video.
It’s a new product for the self-described “digital experience” company, said CEO Thomas Erickson, and sprung from interactions with Acquia’s more than 4,000 customers through professional services engagements. Acquia found itself creating custom applications to address the content sharing conundrum, so the concept was ported to its product team for development, he said. Normally, organizations find themselves pulling content from one source and reformatting it for another channel.
Content Hub is designed to help enterprises share and distribute content better, but also make better use of what it has created, said Erickson. Large organizations in particular often have information sitting is silos that not only isn’t accessible to everyone who needs, but often forgotten unnecessarily recreated from scratch. The platform includes discovery tools faceted search to help end users relevant content from other sites, departmental archives or content management systems quickly.
For an enterprise in a heavily-regulated industry, such as a pharmaceutical company, Erickson said Content Hub could facilitate the release of a great deal of information it must disclose for compliance reasons.
He said it’s not uncommon for large organizations to house documents across different locations using different technologies because of their size or due to mergers and acquisitions over time. And while many try to unify content management onto a single system, it’s not always realistic. “It’s an alternative to trying to get everyone on one system.”
Content Hub includes an integration framework to access and publish content within existing workflows, although Erickson said it could be used to migrate all information from one system to another – it supports dozens of different content and document management systems including Microsoft SharePoint and open source Alfresco, as well as “classic back-end” systems such as Documentum.
Since Content Hub is SaaS-based and runs in the cloud, there’s no installation or maintenance required onsite, said Erickson. It’s designed for an end user with access control for each and every piece of content, it can be used to publish public content and disseminate private content.