docXtend is designed as a ‘no-code’ solution. It means that your business application is integrated with your Enterprise Content Manager (ECM) platform with no need of a customization, API integration or application re-engineering.
The solution is based on Tecknolab‘s innovative technology of DB data layer virtualization. This technology is able to automatically inspect your application data model and create an ad-hoc virtualization schema in your applications’ database (it is an independent schema; your application data model is not altered in any way). This virtualization schema has the capability of solving syntactically and semantically the same SQL “CRUD” operations (select, insert, update and delete) as the original one (data is not copied from the original data model it is just a thin data virtualization layer). This enable us to reconfigure the application and connect it to the database through the automatically created schema; the application will issue the same queries and SQL operations as before, receiving the same results, so it should work exactly as before.
However, the new virtualization layer adds some capabilities that we did not have before. In this case, the solution can move content stored at the database to an external repository, in this case a content manager, without impact. The virtualization layer is able to intelligently merge the SQL select operations and inject the externalized content when requested by the application. From an application perspective, the interface is the same; it remains issuing SQL queries through the database. The results are the same either, the content is retrieved as if it were at the database. So, from a existing (potentially legacy) application and from an application’s user perspective there is no changes. However, our selected content (typically documents, images, the type of content that bloats a database, increasing its size and maintenance costs) is now at our content manager. This is not only operationally optimal but opens a wide range of additional scenarios and documental processes that can be easily triggered when using a powerful ECM solution.
In summary, we can achieve a complete and tight integration from any arbitrary business application with an ECM platform without writing a single line of code.