Critical Analysis of ECM Applications in the Clouds: A Case Study

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has become one of the most important strategies in enterprise to manage enterprise contents over their lifecycle. ECM solutions are commonly used in many areas such as document management, web content management, record management, digital asset management, etc. Key features of ECM solutions are capturing, indexing, preserving and retrieving of digital information. In our work, an Electronic Dissertation and Thesis (EDT) application has been chosen as a typical ECM application for the case study and has been developed using state-of-the-art technologies. This paper considers the key characteristics of EDT applications and critically analyses various cloud options for deployment of such an application to maximise availability, scalability and data consistency. This paper also addresses the limitation of some existing cloud services that are related to query documents, and provided a workaround solution for abstract queries and parallel execution of complex queries.