Zero-Install Desktop Integration

Crossing the chasm between the office and ECM

Imagine every employee of your organization could access documents stored in your Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system as easily as never before. Imagine your staff would find, open, edit, and store documents of a wide range of formats in a multitude of applications without even realizing they were working in the ECM system. A beautiful dream? No, it is reality!

This is exactly what you get with WeWebU Zero-Install Desktop Integration. It makes working with ECM systems as easy as pie. It allows using your ECM system intuitively and with virtually no training effort from a wide range of desktop applications like Microsoft (MS) Office and Adobe Acrobat X (even the Reader!) but also from open source programs like LibreOffice, OpenOffice or Notepad++.

WeWebU Zero-Install Desktop Integration: Powerful eFile Management and Search integrated in File Open/Save dialog of many Office applications

WeWebU Zero-Install Desktop Integration only uses the standard menu items and terminology of the respective applications, such as File Open or Save As. Within these dialogs, it provides powerful searches and even eFile management capabilities. Thus, there is no need for time-consuming browsing, especially in large ECM Systems. Directly from Microsoft, Libre or OpenOffice, Adobe Acrobat X or even Acrobat X Reader and many other desktop applications, users create and index new documents or edit the metadata of existing documents.

Check-out, check-in and versioning run automatically in the background. This feature frees the users from that burden and allows them to fully concentrate on their actual work. Users of MS Word can enjoy even more comfort. When they open a document, certain fields in it like e.g. a customer number or address are automatically populated with metadata from the ECM system. But also indexing of new documents will be accelerated by the transfer of field contents from documents to metadata in the ECM system when a document is saved.

Populating fields in Office applications with metadata from the ECM system

In addition, WeWebU Zero-Install Desktop Integration exposes parts of your ECM system as so called Direct Access Folders (DAF) which are shown as a network drive, e.g Z:. This means that in Windows Explorer users can browse the folder structure and directly drag and drop documents from the ECM system to e.g. other folders in Windows Explorer, the Desktop or the attachment field of e-mails. Vice versa, they can store documents in the ECM system by just dragging and dropping them to the DAF.

Opening documents is as easy as that: Users just click on the document in the DAF in Windows Explorer and it is opened in the respective desktop application or they navigate in the Open dialog of literally any desktop application to the folder and open the document. With the standard Save function of the application any changes are stored back to the ECM system. There is no more user-friendly or more intuitive way of working with documents from your ECM system!

WeWebU Zero-Install Desktop Integration is the most advanced and most versatile desktop integration. It supports all major versions and products of the MS Office suite as well as a multitude of other commonly used desktop applications. It supports different IBM ECM repositories as well as CMIS compliant ones like Alfresco. It is seamlessly integrated into WeWebU OpenWorkdesk and can be integrated into other ECM front-ends as well. Thus, it allows users to directly open, edit and save documents there.

The fine-granular rights and role concept gives the users exactly the views, eFiles, and searches they need to accomplish their tasks. Thus, the effort of storing documents in the ECM system is not greater than saving them in the local file system. Redundant storage and overwriting of documents is avoided, while time is not wasted searching for the latest and “correct” document version. If a user assumes several roles in the corporation, he can quickly switch between them by using the role selector without the need to log-out and log-in to the systems again. The employees’ productivity rises while at the same time all changes and versions are stored and tracked. Hence, compliance is easily achieved.

In spite of all that technical finesse, WeWebU Zero-Install Desktop Integration does not require any roll-out. Worldwide unique, it does not need any installation on the client, avoiding all related problems and costs. Just add the link to Zero-Install Desktop Integration to your Favorites folder once and you are ready to work with the documents from your ECM system!