Orange
French mobile telecommunications and broadband internet provider manages communication through a secure extranet portal built on the Nuxeo Platform.
Orange, one of the world’s largest mobile telecommunications and broadband internet providers with over 160 million mobile customers and more than 14 million broadband customers, uses Hyland's Nuxeo Platform for document management.
Orange manages communication with its enterprise clients through a secure extranet portal. This document-centric extranet handles contracts, invoices and project documentation, with an emphasis on secure, managed access to well-defined sections of the portal. Because the legacy system was no longer able to manage the growing volumes of documents and simultaneous users, they replaced it with Nuxeo Platform’s document management module as a back-end.
Scaling document management
Orange already had a system in place for managing documents and making them accessible to their enterprise clients, with Documentum as a back-end. The problem was essentially success. More large enterprise clients meant more system users, and a growing volume of documents to manage in the repository. The volume grew too big for the existing system, so they had to find a better solution.
Ms. Brignou managed the development of a solution using Nuxeo Platform document management as a back-end. One of the main challenges of the project was having a clear understanding of the document sharing process, and mapping that to functional and technical requirements. The system design and development process was an iterative process, in collaboration with the internal users of the system. Updates every two weeks helped ensure that the project was on track to meet the functional requirements of the users.
Document sharing at enterprise level
The process of moving documents to the Extranet was necessarily well orchestrated, because it required security of access for each step along the way. A manager from Orange determines which documents should be accessible on the client extranet, and which person at Orange manages the process for that topic.
The combination of a modular, extensible platform and a motivated team has helped us build a solution that responds exactly to our needs.
— Cécile Brignou, Engineering Manager at France Telecom
The document sharing system needed to manage access rights for two different groups of internal users, and the external clients. For the internal users, the process of placing documents in the system for client access needed to handle large numbers of documents smoothly and efficiently.
Managing high volumes of documents
To address the issue of importing large numbers of documents in the system in a single gesture, a drag-and-drop mechanism was set up. The document import to Nuxeo Platform takes place in a “drop box” belonging to each internal Orange user. This buffer space enables the import of large numbers of documents, without transaction issues. A publication step after the import makes the documents available to external clients.
Security matters
Security, authentication, and access controls were the most important aspects of the solution. There were two distinct user populations: Orange users and external client users. Some of the Orange users needed read-write access to some of the documents, some needed read-only access. Both internal and external users have access restricted to a specified perimeter.
The Nuxeo Platform offers an advanced and highly configurable access control system that enabled the development of a fine-grained, organization-specific definition of access control policies.
Never go legacy again
Because of the close collaboration between the project team and the internal end users, when the system was put into production, there was very positive feedback, and an easy transition with high user adoption.
By replacing the legacy solution, based on Documentum, with Nuxeo Platform document management, large volumes of documents could be imported and performance issues were eliminated, so that the end users benefit from a much more efficient online application. This translates to higher productivity for the team and better customer satisfaction for the end users.
More innovations to come
More innovations are coming in the next version of this document sharing solution, including:
- A mechanism on the extranet for clients to subscribe to an offer, giving them access to all documents in the specific space for that offer
- Giving external clients the possibility of uploading documents to the system
To remember:
- Nuxeo Platform with document management
- Flex User Interface integrated
- 200 enterprise clients; 80 users