2023 brings new owners to Micro Focus Content Manager. Previously TRIM, the EDRMS is now OpenText Content Manager (CM). This article looks at how to improve the quality of record management by creating a relationship between a document in CM and its owner record in Salesforce.

Disconnected documents are a huge challenge for those who look after important records. Record managers are well aware that every document has a context and is connected to people, places, times, other documents, and more. An orphaned document on a user's computer is missing its context and provides only half a story.

The very act of adding a document to an EDRMS risks losing context information. For example, passing an attachment on an inbound email to CM requires the attachment to be separated from the referencing email, and an often ambivalent decision is made about where it should be located in CM.

In an ideal world, every CM document would hold a reference to related records outside the system that contain supplementary information. Inversely, those external objects would also hold a reference to the document in CM.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a common "landing place" for documents that have associations with organizations, people, products, and problems. Salesforce does not, however, have the document handling features of CM so important documents need to be moved into that system. This creates a dilemma because the contextual information remains in Salesforce. Furthermore, the links between the document in CM and its parent record in Salesforce (and vice versa) need to be created.

Integration

Integrating provides the answers! The T4S integration from FuseIT enables Salesforce documents to be moved or copied to configurable locations in CM. A number of features ensure contextual information is never lost:

• A link in Salesforce is created to the document location in CM
• A link is created in CM that references the Salesforce parent record
• Salesforce record fields are mapped to CM metadata fields
• Can be configured to map Salesforce documents to complex taxonomies in CM including the ability to dynamically create and name hierarchies
• Saves the Salesforce record associated with any attached Content Document (attachment)  to CM (as an HTML file)

An integrated system automates the transfer of Salesforce documents to CM, along with the key metadata, and the associated Salesforce record that held the document. In CM, the documents are auto-located and a meta-data field provides the URL of the reference record in Salesforce. A T4S option enables the document to be kept or deleted from Salesforce. In both cases, a reference to the CM document is created in Salesforce. T4S also allows a record in CM to be copied back to Salesforce on demand if there is a need to do so.

Integration has many other benefits, including saving costs by automating document handling, reducing the document footprint in Salesforce, improving document access and processing efficiencies, and more.