While there are many vendors in the market promising content integration, SeeUnity is unique in several important respects. These differences amount to integration products that are off-the-shelf, easy to install, bi-directional, and expandable to create a multi-stage integration roadmap.
Many content integration "products" are really services-intensive results of a single integration project. These offerings typically require substantial services efforts to implement the integration. Once the integration has been made, these projects are susceptible to being compromised by basic changes to the content environment, such as platform upgrades or security changes.
Unlike these offerings, SeeUnity is product-oriented. The current release of the SeeUnity product line is the mature result of substantial development efforts. As a result, these products are easier and less expensive to install, remain more stable over time, and are easier to support.
Services intensive integration represent a fixed, point-in-time solution. If any of the products being integrated are updated, support is no longer guaranteed. More likely, the vendor will have to be contracted again to ensure support. In contrast, SeeUnity customers can be confident that as new versions of integrated technologies are released, such as SharePoint and content management platforms, SeeUnity will release patches and upgrades to ensure ongoing integration support.
SeeUnity products have been carefully engineered to provide off-the-shelf functionality, while minimizing configuration requirements. Unlike other integration technology, SeeUnity products can be set up easily with a point and click interface. With proper training, additional customization can often be done directly by administrators from within SharePoint.
SeeUnity products all utilize a common underlying technology - the Core Integration Services (CIS). Once CIS is installed, functionality can be delivered easily, by adding modular products that perform specific tasks. From searching and security to archiving and profile editing, organizations can choose the products they need to solve specific challenges. SeeUnity's modular, building block approach means that companies can expand their content integration over time, to meet new requirements and challenges. Connectors to additional ECM repositories can also be easily added through modular repository connectors. The ability to purchase products according to specific need also can provide substantial cost optimization over "all or nothing" alternatives.
Many integration products focus on a fixed, one-to-one integration between two systems. While SeeUnity can certainly offer a fixed integration, our products support integration between SharePoint and any number of content sources. Much like our pluggable, building block system of integration products, companies can added connectors from our library to integrate SharePoint to additional content sources. This expandable library allows organizations to test and expand integration over time. Companies can also meet changing integration requirements – such as introducing a newly acquired content library. SeeUnity supports a number of industry standard content management systems and repositories, including:
Many products touting content integration provide the ability to view enterprise content through an alternate interface, such as SharePoint. These customized clients provide the ability to search for content, or browse. To actually access content, or to change settings and metadata, users have to use the original native ECM client. With SeeUnity, all of the original functionality of the native ECM client can be recreated in SharePoint. Content can be searched and browsed, but also edited, checked in and out – even document settings such as retention and security can be changed. With SeeUnity, users can finally standardize completely around a SharePoint client, without having to worry about hopping back to the native client to perform certain actions.
Content integration offerings are typically geared towards solving a specific integration challenge. Unlike these offerings, SeeUnity's expandable library of integration building blocks allow companies to plan and execute a multi-stage integration roadmap. Organizations can start with integrating native ECM client functionality into a SharePoint interface for a standard, streamlined user experience (learn more about integration products here). Integration can be expanded with archiving and distribution capabilities that can move, mirror and link content between SharePoint and external repositories (learn more about archiving & distribution products here). Finally organizations can conclude integration with a full volume migration of content, metadata and permissions from an existing repository to a content management platform of choice (learn more about migration here). Because of the building block approach to our integration products, organizations can reuse and build upon existing investments. SeeUnity understands that integration can be a moving target; our tools help customers keep pace with their evolving content management goals. Click here to learn more about building an integrated content management roadmap with SeeUnity.