Collaboration has become very important in a work place. It increases efficiency and productivity of employees. Documentum eRoom is one of collaboration tools available on the market.
It is a web-based shared workspace where team members can store project content, communicate and share ideas, assign task, and manage deliverables using a shared project context. It improves knowledge sharing, decision making, and problem solving.. eRoom integrates well with Microsoft Office, Microsoft Project, and other desktop applications. Files can be imported from Microsoft Project into eRoom.
Project Planning
You can kick off a project by selecting people from the enterprise directory and inviting them into the eRoom workspace. eRoom sends an email invitation with the hyperlink to this workspace. Users can leverage the workspace by saving their business files in this workspace for others to view.
eRoom includes project scheduling engine to organize, manage, and report on project tasks and milestones.
eRoom has dashboard feature which provides users the ability to see such information as events, tasks, and status across multiple eRoom workspaces and so to manage and coordinate multiple projects in one place. Users can create personalized views. Within the dashboard, project data can be rolled up from multiple eRoom workspaces, providing detailed real-time visibility into the status of multiple projects at once.
You can create a project plan with tasks and milestones, assign owners and deadlines. You can also view tasks relationships and interdependencies with Gantt chart views and enable project team members to update their own tasks as well as report on the status of task groupings or the entire project.
You can hold real-time on-the-fly meetings to deal with issues, plan, and group edit documents. You can create a discussion to deal with issues. You can use polling to get consensus on open issues.
There are instant notifications and alerts to keep users updated. Users can access project information remotely and work on it offline.
Users Interface
Users can see their tasks list on the left side of screen while working on a task detail in the main window. User interface can be customized. There is a real-time summary view across multiple eRooms of project milestones, issue resolution, or project status information. There is top-down visibility into a larger portfolio of connected project records.
There is full-text search with relevance ranking to locate and re-use documents and data. This search can performed no matter where users are within the larger site environment. Users can initiate full-text search for content within eRooms to which they have access.
There is version tracking to maintain a history of changes for each document without losing iterative versions. The multi-step approval process can be configured to get sign-off on documents and deliverables.
Items can be copied and pasted or dragged and dropped from any eRoom to any other eRoom within the same community. Database templates can also be copied and pasted from any eRoom to any other eRoom.
There are standard templates to create new workspaces. Existing workspaces can also be used to create new workspaces. You can leverage saved repository of plans, procedures, discussions, and solutions.
Files can be downloaded and shared via email or portable media like a CD or USB drive.
Documents can also be expired to make sure that the most current version of documents is available for use.
My eRoom feature provides users with the single interface where they can visit all their accessed in the past rooms. Users can access it from any location.
Security
eRoom has robust security. Every item has its own access control which includes an ability to restrict control who may open it, edit, or view it. For example, a discussion thread about a new product under development could be hidden from everyone on a team except those who need to see it.
Security can be integrated with the third-party authentication products.
Information Rights Management
Information Rights Management is included to these security controls. Users can prohibit printing a document, disable copy/paste, prevent screen capture, and watermark pages if printing privileges are granted. The security is enforced if the file is accessed while the user is offline.
A copy of the document inherits the permissions of the original document. It is very useful in a situation when an access to the document needs to be revoked, the access permissions of that document can be modified and enforced on all copies no matter where they are located. There is also a complete audit trail that reflects all activity on protected documents.
The IRM server uses cryptography with symmetric ciphers. With a symmetric cipher the same key used to encrypt information is also used to decrypt it. After a user connects to the server and selects desired security parameters, the IRM server generates a random encryption key for each page of content, records a local copy of the keys and policies, and sends these keys to the user. They user encrypts the content using these keys.
The system ensures that even authorized users cannot get direct access to encryption keys. Keys and policies are kept only on the server to prevent offline security breach. All time-based decisions are made based on the server clock and not on a user’s clock which could be a subject to unauthorized users.
User Management
User selection within a large list of users can be managed in a tabbed, alphabetically sorted selection interface. This reduces the number of clicks needed to select users for addition to eRoom members lists, access control lists, notification alerts, and other areas.
It is a full-feature collaboration solution and is the foundation of eRoom Enterprise, a companion product integrated with Documentum Content Management Platform.
eRoom Enterprise
eRoom Enterprise integrates collaboration and content management features. Teams can work on projects, resolve issues, make decisions, and engage external participants. At the same time, the content is stored in the enterprise repository which allows team members to search for, reference, re-use or publish information.
eRoom Enterprise provides an environment in which people from different organizations and different time zones can work together on projects, programs, and processing while managing content which is generated during this process as an end result.
eRoom Enterprise provides enterprise repository across collaborative workspaces. It includes content management features such as library services, life cycles, renditions, virtual documents, workflows, records policy management, retention, etc.
Discussions, data tables, notes, and calendars are available throughout the repository. In this way, they can be tracked, audited, and archived. This is especially important as companies look to ensure that content created by teams is managed within corporate governance guidelines.
Users can leverage this framework to securely interact with external participants while protecting internal content from unauthorized access.
It includes the support for the classification of collaborative content according to corporate taxonomies and categorization strategies. Companies that have developed custom content properties based on document types or other criteria can use these properties in eRoom Enterprise, enforcing classification of content according to corporate standards.
Centrally managed content can be delivered to multiple applications and projects. Collaborative content, including file templates, can be shared across multiple eRoom workspaces without duplication, reducing human errors, and eliminating time spent searching for or recreating existing information.
