ACOM Bolsters Security of Content Management System

February 2, 2010 Alex Woodie

The new release of EZContentManager announced by ACOM Solutions last week contains several new administrative functions that are designed to provide more fine-grained security controls aimed at ensuring the right people have access to the right documents. Several other handy features, such as the capability to roll back a document to a previous version to see changes, also make their debut with version 3.9.

EZContent Manager was launched by ACOM in 2005 to fill what the company saw as a void in the market for affordable and easy to use content management systems. The suite allows users to index and archive just about any type of document–from Word and Excel files to i OS spool files and scanned paper documents–in its SQL Server-based repository. The product also includes workflow capabilities that are handy for routing documents through different people in an organization, as well as various options for using OCR scanning, linking similar documents, and accessing documents from smart phones, among other capabilities. Pricing starts at around $10,000.

With version 3.9, ACOM has made several enhancements to the security provisions of EZCM. For starters, administrators now have the capability to restrict certain document types from a specific user or a group of users. This new layer of security can also be applied at the metadata level, thereby restricting access to documents with specific indexed field values.

Administrators also get the capability to edit group membership details at the individual user level, which ACOM says will help administrators to maintain groups and their associated permissions. EZCM 3.9 also comes with a new “globalize” metadata value that will make metadata fields available to all document types. While not strictly a security enhancement, the addition of field constraints to index field values will ensure that the field always contains the correct input, ACOM says. Lastly, this release gains new faxing capabilities for distributing reports.

Several “user efficiency” enhancements were made with this release, including the capability to roll back from a versioned document to the original version, allowing users to view the modification process; the capability to e-mail documents that have been linked or associated in a single outbound message; and the capability to retrieve indexed fields from a database when manually uploading a document.