This section includes information about functional aspects of the Nuxeo Platform and its modules.
Functional Q&A
| Question | Nuxeo Response |
|---|---|
| Document Management | |
| What is the current version of your Document Management product? | The current version is 5.5. |
| What is the typical release cycle for your Document Management product? | Major releases occur approximately once per year. Minor releases approximately every quarter. |
| Describe the check in / check out capabilities. | Users can download documents for which they have edit rights for further revision. Users can choose to 'lock' or not lock the downloaded (checked-out) document. Locking ensures that no other user can edit while in checked-out mode. Upon document revision, the user can return the document to the repository, uploading it (checking in) as the same version, or as a new major or minor version. Comments and notes are available for each version. Locked documents are always available for preview or read-only mode, along with associated history and metadata. |
| Describe the version control capabilities. | A document version is a representation of a document at a given time. A version can have its own text comment or label associated with it (major and minor versions), can be accessible in read-only mode, and be linked to the original document. Version management can be activated or not according to the document type. By default, when a document has been edited, the user chooses one of the following options:
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| Does your product support compound documents? How? | Yes. Compound documents are supported by all Nuxeo Platform-based products. Each document object can hold an unlimited number of actual electronic files. A word-processing document may have multiple renditions or translations, attached to the single document home page. A digital photograph may hold multiple resolutions or sizes as alternative files. Metadata and security are managed for the entire content object. Unique document URLs permit usage of content across other web pages, documents, intranets. |
| Describe your document linking capabilities | Each document has its own unique static URL for easy linking across web applications or embedding in other documents. Nuxeo also supports the concept of relationships across managed items. Nuxeo integrates a relationship engine (called NxRelations) which coordinates all relations between documents and any subsequent updates. For example, when a document is destroyed, associated relations must be updated accordingly to ensure there are no gaps). The following relations are available:
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| Are hypertext links used in compound documents? | We support either hypertext links (since every stored content item is addressable using a single URL) as well as internal relationship links using internal IDs. |
| What foldering / structuring capabilities does the product have? | There are several foldering capabilities available in Nuxeo by default, as well as a broad range of extended folder configuration or customization capabilities available by using the Nuxeo Studio design tool, or by using the APIs. The three default folder types are:
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| Describe the content import capabilities. | Import of content into the Nuxeo repository can be done by end users, or with administrative tools. End users can use 'drag and drop' batch import to quickly populate the repository with their own content. Folders from a shared drive or local PC can be captured by dragging into a Nuxeo folder or workspace. For larger complex batches, system administrators can configure import sets using XML scripts to assign/extract metadata. This also works for the batch export of content. The default import/export format is based on an XML format which can easily be extended or modified. The import/export operation can be extended to data linked to documents (such as metadata, relationships, audit recording). Exported zip file archives can be re-imported by simple drag and drop. The Importer framework provides a robust, configurable tool for importing bulk file systems, and their metadata, into the Nuxeo repository easily and efficiently. Captured content is managed by version control, processed through a workflow, and retrieved through search and navigation. Extremely flexible bulk import tools allow the definition of:
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| Describe the document and text indexing capabilities | All Nuxeo managed documents are indexed in the document repository. The search engine the following functions:
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| Does your product support notifications? | Yes. Notifications can be triggered on a wide range of activities on documents, folders or workflow tasks. |
| Does your product support an offline capability? | Yes. Nuxeo has an offline secure client intended for information workers who need to have full access to corporate content while not on network/internet connections. A highly optimized lean version of the Nuxeo application can run locally on the desktop/laptop with the same UI as the web version, ensuring minimal user re-training. The rich client is based on Eclipse RCP ensuring fully updated and integrated offline capabilities, strong support for heavy desktop content producers, and can be encrypted so that corporate content is protected while at client sites or on the road. |
| Imaging Support | |
| Can your product support images in the same repository as documents? | Yes, images can be stored in the same repository as documents, though some organizations may choose to have a separate repository for images. This can be determined by the customer business and technical requirements. All standard image or digital photograph formats are supported. A specific folder type called 'Picturebook' is available for easy, thumbnail view navigation making it simple for end users to retrieve, markup, annotate, print or route images. |
| Describe the product's scalability to support volumes of images | The Nuxeo repository has been successfully tested in a production environment with 100 Million items, with no performance loss compared to a 10 Million item repository. |
| Do you support features for caching and prefetching of images? | Yes. The Nuxeo Platform uses the browser cache to cache the pictures and offer tiling systems to navigate in large images. Using this feature, the user only fetches the part of the picture being seen, can zoom in/zoom out and the right tile component is sent to the browser. This allows easy navigation even in multi-GB pictures, such as satellite or medical imagery. |
| Do you provide your own image capture tool? What third party products can be used? | Nuxeo supports a range of image processing and markup capabilities by default, but recommends third party high volume scan or capture tools for intensive customer requirements. Nuxeo has a partnership with Readsoft that includes supported connectors available from Nuxeo. Kofax is also commonly used by our customer community, and integrations have been built for specific customer deployments. The Nuxeo internal image processing and manipulation capabilities are provided by the open source Image Magick toolset under the Apache 2.0 license. |
| Describe the product's image indexing capabilities | Image files can be automatically recognized upon import with the Nuxeo file manager service. Image metadata can be extracted automatically as part of import. Metadata of images is fully indexed for search and retrieval. |
| Describe the product's image markup or annotation features | A range of preview, zoom in/zoom out, annotation, multi-user commenting and markup functions can be done on any image formats (as well as office document formats) with our capabilities that use the Annotea W3C standard. |
| What hardware devices are supported? | The scanner or multi-function devices supported are dependent on the third party scanning or image processing application used. |
| Workflow / BPM | |
| Describe your solution's workflow/BPM capabilities | Nuxeo includes a fully integrated, contextually available workflow engine that is based on the RedHat JBoss JBPM engine. It manages tasks such as:
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| Describe how your product's workflows are defined | There are 3 main ways to define a workflow:
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| Does your workflow engine work across all products/modules? | Yes. The workflow is completely transversal to the underlying Nuxeo Platform architecture, and can interact with any component, module or application built with it. |
| Describe how content is processed / routed | The content is not itself moved during the course of a workflow, but surfaced to task participants via URLs, links, and references during the task notifications. Processing of content, however, can be built in a workflow stages as part of the Nuxeo Studio content automation events. As an example, specify a stage to render the final approved version into PDF, or publish to the corporate intranet after management review. |
| Describe the review and approval capabilities | Nuxeo offers two default document-centric processes:
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| Describe how workflows are managed and administered | The workflow engine in Nuxeo provides direct access to JBPM, with re-usable building blocks (handlers, document operations, graphical interface) in order to make it easy to manage, administer and customize processes. |
| Is there a visual workflow configuration tool? | Yes. The Process Editor provides visual workflow configuration and is part of the JBPM engine embedded in Nuxeo. |
| Do you provide process modeling or analytical reporting tools? | Partially. Extended reporting and analytics are on the Nuxeo roadmap. Reporting today can be done with simple search, sort, navigation with export to XML, CSV, etc. For extended reporting today, integrations have been done with tools such as JasperSoft, BIRT, Intalio, BonitaSoft, and other advanced BPM, or reporting tools. |
| Do you provide role-based, name-based workflow? | Yes. Workflow processes can be attached to different groups, roles or documents. |
| Describe any extended BPM functionality | jBPM can be used for many advanced use cases. The default Nuxeo integration uses it for basic workflow management for document-centric use cases, but it can be (and is widely) used for complex BPM, SOA orchestration or pageflow management. |
| Are the work queues stateful? Can they be load balanced? | Yes. Work queues are stateful and can be load balanced. |
| Content and/or Email Archiving | |
| Describe the content archiving capabilities. What types of archiving do you support? | Content archiving can be done with any item stored in a Nuxeo Platform-based application: office format documents, images, digital assets, PDFs, engineering drawings, email, etc. |
| Is the archiving functionality your own? Are third-party products supported? | Yes, content archiving is part of the Nuxeo Platform. As well, we are engaged in a joint integration project with KOM Networks to deliver an end-to-end integration with their archiving / storage products. |
| Do you have a separate repository for archived content? | Archived content can be in a separate or the same repository depending on the customer business and technical requirements. Several physical repositories can be attached to the same application. Thus, each can have specific usage defined for each, and content can be transferred between them. It does not impact the application code or the business logic, and the content is completely available. It is an optimal way to partition an application to tune performance according to the usage topology of each Core Server. |
| Do you provide an E-mail archiving solution? | Nuxeo supports email capture of items from:
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| Records Management Capabilities | |
| Describe your current and future Records Management capabilities. | Nuxeo has a broad range of services to manage the status of content, its metadata, lifecycle and access controls. Features by default packaged into Nuxeo include:
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| Do you have a separate repository for records management? or can records reside in the same repository as work-in-progress documents? | By default records are managed in the same repository as active documents. However an organization can choose to deploy the product to support separate repositories as business requirements dictate. |
| Can the records management capability enable content to be put "on hold" in any repository? | By default items can be put "on hold" in any Nuxeo Platform application. For external third party repositories, not at this time. |
| Social Collaboration Capabilities | |
| Describe the social and collaboration capabilities of the product. | Collaborative capabilities are part of the optional Social Collaboration module of the Nuxeo Platform. Collaborative features include:
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| Is the same repository used to store and manage documents also used for collaborative / social media content? | Yes. Collaborative content types are stored in the same repository. Blogs, wikis, discussions, comments and annotations/markups are all part of the Nuxeo content repository. For implementations using the OpenSocial integration, it means that content can be consumed/presented in Nuxeo while residing in its originating application. The OpenSocial open API allows the access and sharing of content from external applications using "gadgets", allowing simple mashups of aggregated content from sources such as external news sites, portlets for workflow task lists, recent documents, workspaces, web pages, or utilities such as bookmarks, text editors or external news feeds. |
| Does the product support threaded discussions around documents? | Yes. threaded discussions and comments on documents are supported. |
| Does the product allow users to set up their own collaboration workspace? | Yes. By default all users can create collaborative team or personal workspaces, though business rules can be configured to restrict this if desired. Team workspaces can be created in a hierarchical navigation tree. To create a new team workspace, the end user simply clicks a button to create a new item, selects the 'workspace' item type, provides a name, description, metadata or any access control restrictions. Once created, users can begin to contribute documents, notes, blogs, discussions, sub-folders, pictures or any other content type that may have been defined by the organization for its content application needs. |
| Do you support collaboration outside the firewall? External Users? | Yes. Organizations can choose to grant access to particular sections of the Nuxeo application to external parties for secure, specific access to collaborative content and workspaces. |
| Describe how your product supports wikis, blogs and communities | Basic blog and wiki support is provided in the Nuxeo Platform by default. End users can create these new content types in team workspaces, share them with other users/groups, manage their lifecycle and access controls as with any other content type. OpenSocial support permits the viewing of externally stored community, wiki, blog content within the context of a user's personal dashboard. |
| Describe how your product supports application sharing or projects | Common project structures can be created by templating team workspaces to ensure that common metadata, content types, or documents can be re-created consistently with each new project. Applications created on the Nuxeo Platform can be shared with other Nuxeo-based applications by:
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| Web Content Management and Publishing | |
| Describe your WCM and Publishing capabilities. What third party tools are supported? | Simple web publishing, creation of intra/extranet pages are part of the Nuxeo Platform. Advanced functionality needed to build web site, stage approvals and launch public facing web sites are typically done via integration with third-party components (dedicated WCM or portal products). Nuxeo has integrations with several WCM solutions, including Hippo and Liferay, and has been working on others (such as Drupal and eZ Publish) relying both on native APIs and the CMIS capabilities of the Nuxeo Platform. The web publishing capabilities currently included in the Nuxeo Platform are:
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| Describe web content authoring capabilities | Nuxeo provides the authoring environment for documents and other content types (blogs, wikis, discussions, images, etc) that can be marked for publication via metadata or workflow approvals. The authoring capabilities include full versioning, granular access controls, metadata and tagging support, renditions/publication based on rules or workflow stages. |
| Describe your workflow capabilities for content approval / publishing | The Nuxeo Platform architecture natively supports broad workflow capabilities as part of content approval and publication. Serial or parallel workflows can be created ad-hoc or templated by end users or system administrators. Tasks are assigned to users/groups, and business rules can automate the publication, rendition of final content into a Nuxeo application web page or into a third party WCM application. |
| Does your product publish content into formats that are web-viewable? | Yes. Content can be published into HTML, XML, or rendered into PDF or PDF/A. |
| Describe how the content is delivered to a WCM | Content is delivered via the publication services components that are inherent in the Nuxeo Platform. |
| Does the application provide multi-channel output capabilities? | Yes. Multi-channel output is handled by the rendition engine that is part of the Nuxeo Platform architecture. It can render documents for different channels, including web, mobile, etc. It is easy to define or identify a new rendition form and configure the rendition service to push the preferred format to the identified channel. |
| Metadata and Information Access | |
| Describe the search and retrieval capabilities including the search engine(s) used by default | The search engine used by the Nuxeo Platform is dependent on how the back-end repository is configured. The most common implementation is to use the Nuxeo Core "Visible Content Store" (VCS) option. When this is deployed, all of the indexing is performed by the underlying database (PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS SQL, etc). In less common implementations using the JCR backend, the Apache Lucene engine is used. Searches can be performed on:
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| Which third party search engines are supported? | Integrations with third party search engines are supported. Currently connectors for Exalead, Sinequa, Antidot, Arisem, and the Google Search Appliance are available. |
| Does your product support search across multiple servers /document database? | Yes. Users authorized to access multiple Nuxeo repositories can search them simultaneously from one single search UI. |
| Does your product allow searches to be performed against third-party content stores / repositories | Content applications leveraging CMIS can search Nuxeo and other compliant repositories, however the default Nuxeo search capability does not search third party repositories. |
| Describe your product's metadata management | The Nuxeo Platform base metadata structure for content uses the Dublin Core standard to ensure longevity and interoperability of content descriptors and associated information. Out of the box content capture forms reflect the standard Dublin Core fields (author, language, coverage, etc.). Organizations typically will want to create, rename or otherwise modify the metadata to meet the needs of their business. New metadata fields can be added with the graphical UI provided by Nuxeo Studio, allowing non-developer business analyst/information architect roles to tailor metadata fields. Alternatively, developers can leverage the fact that Nuxeo uses XSD schemas to define metadata. Management of complex XSD types are supported, allowing technical administrators to use this to manage metadata. |
| Does your product support taxonomy development and usage | Yes. Taxonomies can be created and used in a variety of ways. Nuxeo supports an abstract interface to use vocabularies (including hierarchical) from external data sources such as SQL databases or other enterprise applications including SAP for optimal synchronization and consistency of corporate taxonomies. |
| Does your product support summarization, automatic content classification or semantic linking? | Yes. Nuxeo applications can support content auto-classification and named-entity extraction capabilities via optional modules available for download in the Nuxeo Marketplace. An automatic classification package, as well as a semantic linking package that uses the Apache Stanbol semantic engine (formerly known as the IKS FISE project) are available. |
| Other Key Features and Capabilities | |
| What languages are supported? How are products localized? | Nuxeo provides a localization toolkit openly under LGPL, and has a broad global community of customers and partners who help to quickly expand the language set supported. Currently, Nuxeo is available in: Basque, Catalan, Chinese, English, French, Galician, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese (including Brazilian), Russian, Spanish, Vietnamese, with new languages rapidly supported with an open localization/translation toolkit. The estimated time to release a new language for Nuxeo is 1 week (translation, validation and release). |
| Does your product allow end-users to work in the language of their choice? Explain how. | Yes. Nuxeo is designed for multi-lingual environments. Each user can select English, French or any other implemented language on-the-fly within their browser from a simple drop-down menu. there is no need to restart the application or browser session to change language preference. Screens, field names, help dialogues, search forms, columns, error messages, personal dashboards can all appear in the language preference selected. Text fields will allow for the input of any supported language. There is no built in translation capability inside the product, thus user-entered descriptions will appear in the language in which it was input. |
| Is there a delay in providing new releases of the software in English or French? | No. Nuxeo products are released simultaneously in both English and French. |
| Does your product support digital asset management capabilities? | Yes. The Nuxeo Platform comes with an optional module for Digital Asset Management (DAM), which offers an extended feature set, metadata model, IP rights management and thumbnail-driven user interface to meet needs of rich media users. The DAM module shares the same repository as other Nuxeo Platform modules, such as Document Management and Social Collaboration. The DAM module specifically addresses rich media management application design and deployment needs. It has a rich user interface designed specifically for users of large numbers of media assets such as videos, images, digital photos. This rich content can be searched, viewed, manipulated in a thumbnail-driven rich visual UI. The Nuxeo DAM module has an extended metadata model to support DAM and digital photo specific metadata such as IPTC and EXIF, as well as identifiers for source, campaign, subject, licensing, copyright, embargo date, etc. Support for compound documents assures strong support for renditions (multiple sizes, resolutions, media formats of the same image/asset), connected to the same asset profile, with each rendition having a unique URL. Full auditing of asset usage, ability to attach to approval workflows, ability to lock assets, provide a strong base for secure asset control while making it simple to search, retrieve and download the correct item via intuitive web UI. While organizations choose to deploy the Nuxeo DAM module as a standalone application to meet their digital asset management needs, some large organizations have chose to deploy both the Document Management and DAM modules on a single shared repository, simply offering the preferred user experience or metadata model to specific groups of users. Because Nuxeo DAM is built on the Nuxeo Platform, it immediately inherits all of the APIs, standards support (including CMIS). All ongoing innovation to the core Nuxeo Platform architecture rapidly benefits modules such as Document Management, DAM, and Social Collaboration. |
| Case Management | |
| Does your product support case management capabilities? | Yes. Nuxeo provides a Case Management module for the Nuxeo Platform, which offers additional features and capabilities beyond what is offered in the Document Management module. The Case Management module is built from same underlying architecture of the Nuxeo Platform, thus has many of the same platform, customization and configuration capabilities. The Case Management module was designed to specifically address case-centric content application design and development needs, or to meet vertical industry or horizontal use-cases. It contains core case management requirements such as workflow (including JBPM in addition to a lighter-weight document/case routing service), document and item management, search, retrieval, annotation and auditing, as well as extended capabilities unique to case management applications. The Case Management module allows applications to be designed to allow management of folder containers composed of multiple documents (case items), that can be filed in classification trees. The Case Management module reduces solution design and rollout timelines from months to weeks, by building on a set of templates and enhancements that extend the Nuxeo Platform. The Case Management module puts application design into the hands of information architects, business analysts, and domain experts, fast-tracking deployments. Unified inboxes, regardless of incoming item type, as well as dashboards, reporting, pre-built processes and lifecycles, case-centric tagging, categorization and access controls extend the core content management strength of Nuxeo Platform into a streamlined framework for business applications. Application designers can re-use common widgets and plug-ins to significantly reduce development time and take advantage of Nuxeo Studio for customizations that can be ported forward with each new product release. The Case Management module is the first case management framework for an ECM provider released as open source, under LGPL. Nuxeo is deeply committed to both open source and open standards, ensuring that Nuxeo is fully compliant with key initiative such as CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services), Dublin Core, PDF/A, OpenSocial and OSGi. As ECM interoperability standards such as CMIS gain broad adoption, Nuxeo-based deployments are assured of full participation in multi-repository applications that are demanded by large and distributed organizations. |
| Describe the types of case containers in your product. What kind of security can be put on case folders? | The Nuxeo Case Management module supports management of content in the following container/folder types:
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| How are cases sent or distributed in your solution? | Cases can be transferred to users or groups by editing access and making it available for others to work on. All distribution activities are logged in the case audit trail. The Nuxeo Case Management module also includes a content routing capability that allows users to create, update, manage and start workflows on cases. (This capability is also supported in the Document Management module, and is available to other custom applications built with the Nuxeo Platform). Users define a route, add steps (either sequential or parallel) and managers then validate the process. Users can use these defined processes on items by selecting from the list of available routes and clicking to start the process. The Nuxeo Case Management module allows users or groups to have a range of permissions to a route in order to validate it, refuse a step, or modify its behavior. The security of a route is based on the security of the included items (documents). Rights to routes and steps are mapped to rights on the document. Document Routing security options include:
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| Can your Case Management solution be customized? | Yes. Beyond the documented configuration options available in the standard Nuxeo Case Management module, a full developer guide is available on the Nuxeo Documentation Center. An understanding of the Nuxeo Platform, the plug-in architecture or Nuxeo Studio is recommended to take full advantage of the Case Management Framework customization potential. |
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