In times of user-friendly mobile apps and web applications employees are looking for intuitive business applications to simplify their everyday work. The voice-controlled intelligent personal assistant service Alexa, developed by Amazon, offers countless new opportunities for co-operation between man and machine.
A team of dedicated fme developers in Munich, who work with OpenText Documentum on a daily basis, developed an interface between Amazon Alexa and OpenText Documentum to demonstrate a possible business use case. „We have developed this exemplary showcase for the use case ‘operating OpenText Documentum with voice-control’. The application includes only the most essential functionalities to make it easy to work with and achieve your goal instantly, which increases the user acceptance.” explains Markus Oponczewski, Director Business Unit at fme. “Our application could assist OpenText Documentum power users with frequently recurring queries or processes for special documents. Alexa could be programmed to help with explanations for individual tasks in OpenText Documentum. We are also thinking about an interactive tutorial lead by Alexa which would help new employees to find their ways around the complex ECM platform – so the app would shorten the time for introductory trainings of new employees.” continues Oponczewski.
The showcase infrastructure is based on an OpenText Documentum system and Documentum REST Services installed on Amazon Web Services (AWS), a Spring Boot application running on a public Pivotal Cloud Foundry installation (Pivotal Web Services). The OpenText Documentum client is attached via WebSocket connection to react on state changes which bring up the documents etc.
A dedicated Documentum 7.3 environment was set-up in the backend of the showcase which runs on the cloud services of Amazon Web Services (AWS). “We wanted to create a simple, scalable and reusable environment. The underlying repository runs on an OpenText Documentum Content Server and uses the Remote Database Service (RDS) from AWS to archive the meta data. To communicate with the front end we used the REST-API of OpenText Documentum” explains André Aretz, Managing Consultant at fme. Different configuration levels allow to program the application for simple commands as well as for complex process requirements.
A short demonstration of how OpenText Documentum can be operated by voice control can be found on fme’s YouTube Channel