Re-engineer your custom developments with Module Suite

Open up a world of infinite personalization possibilities

OpenText Extended ECM is a leading solution in the Enterprise Information Management (EIM) landscape, serving as the key content platform for numerous organizations across diverse sectors and global markets. Designed for the enterprise market, where each organization has its distinct and unique business requirements, the Extended ECM platform can be adapted to meet the specific nuances of individual business needs through customizations.

Customizations on Extended ECM: most common scenarios

But if it’s true that every company has unique requirements, there are common scenarios where the need for customizations frequently arises, particularly in enhancing the overall user experience or adding functionalities to the standard workflow engine.

End users require easy access to content and information, efficient interaction with the platform, and data organized in a way that is highly relevant to their daily use of the platform. Depending on the type of request to be fulfilled, UX customizations may be needed at various levels of complexity:

• Personalization of the browsing experience, such as adding custom columns to display relevant information at a glance or creating custom menu entries (e.g., adding a ‘Sign with DocuSign’ option for a document) to provide 1-click ways to trigger actions or transformations on records.
• Personalization of the standard interface, as for example Workflow Forms, customized input interfaces designed to assist users in performing tasks within a process. As the type and nature of input required cannot be standardized, workflow forms need to be meticulously tailored to suit the unique needs of the process, industry, and company,
• Dashboards and reporting. Managing information stored in large datasets can be challenging without dedicated interfaces. Creating personalized dashboards and reporting views can help users navigate, filter, aggregate, and visualize data tailored to specific business processes and needs.
• Totally custom user interfaces. When developing “applications” on the platform, fully customized pages are often introduced, operating outside the platform’s basic logic. These pages may remove all standard UI elements to clearly indicate they are part of a specific application, using only the platform’s services to serve these interfaces. In other cases, custom pages harmonize with the platform’s style and operation, mimicking its paradigms.

Whether it’s “simply” adding a column or an action button (…even if it’s not simple or straightforward at all!), or creating entire custom pages, custom developments are unavoidable to ensure smooth usability and a smart way of operating with the platform. However, they may require a significant investment of time and resources, leading to an increased Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Improving Workflow Automation

Another scenario where custom developments become crucial involves workflow automation. Although in fact the Extended ECM workflow engine is extremely powerful, business processes often require additional functionality, typically addressed with WebReports or Event Scripts.

While WebReports is characterized by a verbose proprietary language and lacks robust error handling, using Event Scripts demands the expertise of specialized personnel well-versed in OScript and can lead to security and stability issues due to low-level access to the system engine. In both cases, their deployment can be extremely costly and difficult to maintain, posing challenges to system upgrades.

The examples described above are just a small part of the most common scenarios – usually requiring extensive development – that can be easily implemented with Module Suite instead! See to believe: