Enterprise Content Management (ECM) encompasses a wide variety of software and technologies for retrieving and managing information and applications so that they are accessible to users throughout a company’s network. Integration of these applications and content sources is usually best accomplished not by reprogamming all of them to accomodate a common interface, which quickly becomes time consuming and expensive. Instead, enterprise content management solutions are most often constructed by extracting data from the web interfaces exposed by these differing systems. This content is then reformatted and made available through a web interface or ECM portal. Users of these systems can seamlessly gain access to the content and applications they need. Advanced ECM systems also facilitate two-way interaction, so that the click of one button by a user of the enterprise’s network on a ECM portal web page may update a legacy database, while the click of another button on the same portal page might send an XML request to perform a document search.
screen-scraper software is a critical piece of enterprise content management systems as described above. The software can be used to extract pertinent information from any number of web sources and to reformat that information for use in building an enterprise portal. When used as a server, screen-scraper can be called from external applications, which gives users the flexibility of calling screen-scraper from a .NET, Java or other program.
The flexibility of screen-scraper in managing data that is accessible via the web (both extracting and publishing) makes it an ideal fit for performing enterprise content management tasks. The developers who built and currently support screen-scraper are experts at analyzing data extraction and formatting needs and can recommend the best approach for incorporating the screen-scraper software into your enterprise’s network.