Vilogia, a real estate company, made the decision to use Nuxeo in 2009. They were looking for an enterprise content management solution that would provide a central location for all content. That solution needed to be web-based and built using Java to support a range of platforms (Windows, AS400, Linux) which they owned.
There were two primary use cases:
- They needed to share documents with people across different projects - a standard use case for enterprise content management.
- They wanted a platform that would enable them to store documents in the backend for a number of applications.
After developing a proof of concept that supported both of their uses cases with Nuxeo ECM software and one other ECM solution, Nuxeo proved to be much easier to extend and was less intrusive.
Vilogia has a history of preferring open source solutions. They use Liferay for their Intranet and Joomla! for their Internet - Nuxeo was the perfect complement. In fact, Nuxeo Studio supports 90% of their needs, by helping extend document types and implementing automation APIs.
Initially Vilogia rolled Nuxeo out for document sharing, but in 2013 they began developing their first embedded applications.
ECM-CRM Integration
Manage client information for a call center
In 2013, Vilogia started a new call center, bringing in-house their previous call center activities and agents. They implemented a commercial CRM application that provided a single view of clients for call center agents, but also need a place to store client documents that could be accessed through the CRM.
The approach could have been to store the documents in a file system, but it wouldn’t provide capabilities such as indexing and workflow, and it wouldn’t allow a user to retrieve the document from within the CRM.
While the CRM is a commercial, closed source solution, it was web- and Javabased and could be easily interconnected with the Vaadin email solution that Vilogia had built. Integrating Nuxeo for document storage was the next step.
Connected User Experience
Storing documents was easy, but Nuxeo also needed to collect documents on behalf of the Vaadin email app, download all emails, index them and send them to the CRM to get more information to process them (incoming email doesn’t usually have all the information to know which customer it’s related to).
With several different applications to integrate together (CRM, Nuxeo, Vaadin email generator), Vilogia needed to ensure they built a simple but efficient architecture that would handle all of their uses cases.
Although not a Nuxeo challenge specifically, Nuxeo helped to significantly simplify the architecture by providing standard automation interfaces that all developers could use.
The way Nuxeo helped us was through the use of very standard interfaces using Nuxeo Automation APIs…it was very easy to implement.
Christophe Capon, CIO
Better Customer Experience
The biggest qualitative benefit that Vilogia saw was improved customer relationships. Contact center employees had more consistent information with all client exchanges available on one screen.
Roadmap
Vilogia’s contact center gets two kinds of calls: commercial calls (deals, charges, etc…) and technical calls (landlord type issues). The current solution supports the commercial calls, the next step is to support the technical calls. But where there are 20 different use cases for commercial calls, there are hundreds of uses cases for technical calls (e.g. leaks, cracked walls). The CRM needs to be integrated with the ERP system which handles the technical details of each lease (number of rooms, windows, sinks, bathtubs, etc..) to ensure the call center agent has all the right details.
Nuxeo GUI
An intuitive UI
The standard Nuxeo interface is very rich and sometimes complex for non-technical people. They were fielding a lot of calls from people who wanted to simply view documents. They were also using Nuxeo to share documents with external people.
What they needed was a simple link/login they could send people to browse and view documents without further training. So Vilogia decided to create a basic, simple interface to share, browse and query documents.
Vaadin & Nuxeo
Here, Vilogia implemented a Vaadin web application and used Nuxeo automation.
Easy implementation
As the Nuxeo automation interface is designed to allow this type of application, there were no major challenges. The biggest challenge for Vilogia came in the form of designing an interface that was user friendly and worked well on tablets.
Better productivity
Implementing this basic web application significantly reduced the hotline calls as it was very easy to browse and search for documents in a standard view.
Future Roadmap
While there is a strong temptation to allow uploading/modification of documents, Vilogia does not want to rewrite the whole Nuxeo interface. There may be plans to enhance search and browsing, but the application does what it was meant to - provide easy access to documents stored in Nuxeo.
Google Lite Search App
Powerful Search
With over 28,000 documents stored in Nuxeo, Vilogia wanted to make the Nuxeo search more relevant, helping people quickly identify visually the document they were looking for. What they wanted was to make the search Google-like, by integrating Apache SolR to handle
snippets.
Configuration or custom code
When they started, Vilogia didn’t know if they could do it, worried that they would have to go too deeply into the Nuxeo source code, making it cost prohibitive.
Yet they did believe it could be done. So the biggest challenge was to figure out where they would inject their custom code to be as least intrusive as possible. They also wanted a plugin that was easy to put in and to remove.
Fast implementation
To make it work, they found the right extension points - overloaded the PageProvider class with a SolRQuery DocPageProvider, a Nuxeo display widget and 4-5 page providers. The nice surprise was how small the amount of work was to complete the project, taking only three days.
This solution will be released at the end of 2013/beginning of 2014.
The Roadmap
The Google-Lite search app had very specific, targeted requirements. Currently you can extend it by selecting to view 2-3 paragraphs instead of the default 1. Vilogia will look at new technical requirements such as indexing different types of documents which can’t be indexed easily by Apache SolR (such as AutoCAD documents).