DM1901

OPINION: CONTAINERISATION Dm
"CAPTURE 2.0 SOLUTIONS INCORPORATE MULTIPLE DIFFERENT ELEMENTS USED TO CONVERT HUMAN LEGIBLE
AND ANALOGUE INFORMATION INTO USABLE TAGGED DATA THAT DRIVES THE BUSINESS APPLICATIONS. THESE
DIFFERENT ELEMENTS WILL INEVITABLY BE DEVELOPED AND OFFERED BY MULTIPLE DIFFERENT VENDORS.
CONTAINERISATION BECOMES CRITICAL TECHNOLOGY TO ENABLE THIS."
for information pertaining to a subject. It all
has to be managed and DM Magazine
remains the logical place to discuss the
technologies involved.
Containerisation is now the hot topic for
web developers. In a web services
environment it is critical that users and
developers can leverage code from multiple
different sources: it used to be that API's
satisfied this, but they can be timeconsuming
to integrate and every time the
software is updated, the API has to be
included and tested. When the API vendor
updates his software it all has to be
reintegrated and tested.
As with documents, versioning and
management of these independent code
elements is critical. Containerisation goes a
long way to solving this. Containerisation is
a way to create programs or sub-programs
that perform an independent function or
series of functions and standards have been
created to encourage co-existence.
The background is that in late 2015 an
initiative to develop containerisation
standards became the Open Container
Initiative (www.opencontainers.org). OCI is
part of the Linux foundation and develops
industry standards for container formats
and container runtime software for
multiple platforms. The starting point for
the OCP standards was Docker technology
with sponsors including AWS, Google,
IBM, HP, Microsoft, VMware, Red Hat,
Oracle, Twitter, HP, Docker (who invested
5%) and CoreOS.
Docker seems to have emerged as the key
technology being used by the majority of
vendors to create containerised code that
can be embedded within an application.
Multiple Containers can run on the same
machine or on multiple machines in a
virtual environment, but to the user it looks
like one system.
So can we equate a 'document' with a set
of containerised code, and if so, why might
that be interesting to traditional Document
Management vendors and users?
As we move to cloud services
architectures, document management
users will increasingly leverage packaged
software elements to build their solutions.
They will need to be able to incorporate
new capabilities and modify those as new
technologies appear.
In my company's space, which is 'Capture',
users will build containerised solutions
integrated with the business usage - we call
this Capture 2.0 and believe that it
represents a $30bn services opportunity for
vendors and service providers.
As can be seen in the diagram above,
Capture 2.0 solutions incorporate multiple
different elements used to convert human
legible and analogue information into
usable tagged data that drives the business
applications. These different elements will
inevitably be developed and offered by
multiple different vendors. Containerisation
becomes critical technology to enable this.
In summary, documents, files and folders
are all containers that allow us to manage
and control information. Computer code is
similar - it needs to be managed and
controlled. The DM technologies we deal
with are never more relevant than today.
These 'containers' need to be managed just
like content. Maybe DM Magazine should
be renamed CM for Content Management?
More info: www.hsassocs.com
www.document-manager.com
January/February 2019
@DMMagAndAwards
29