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Case Study - Communities and Local Government
Background
Oxford University Press (OUP) has a wide range of web assets that are managed and delivered using an Enterprise Content Management System and hosted externally within OUP's Group Web Environment. A significant proportion of that content requires various types of access control. Prior to our engagement this was managed by their own Access Control System (ACS) which had been developed in-house over several years.
OUP decided to replace this system due to a variety of reasons including functional constraints inherent within its design and a lack of ownership across the business divisions with the need for any configuration changes to go through the IT support process which took time and always incurred further internal costs.
Three specific factors were prominent in OUP's decision to replace their ACS:
1. There was a general requirement for a system easier to maintain underpinned with formal support contracts and service level agreements from a large specialist organization. rather than risk the knowledge loss with internal IT processes driven by one or two individuals.
2. A new requirement emerged from the Academic publishing division that the old system could not provide i.e access to protected student resources via activation codes printed in individual text books.
3. The requirement for single sign on across OUP's web presence: a common platform to provide the facility for each user to have one global OUP account rather than potentially having multiple accounts for different business unit web sites.
Technology Selection
A technology selection process was undertaken by measuring various systems against existing requirements. The proprietary eMeta eRights software was selected as the ideal platform. This software provides a set of components that can be described as "entitlements management" for protecting online assets. This system is completely independent to the concerns of asset or content management and vice versa. It can be used with any system or combination of systems (such as a Web CMS and an Asset Management system) on any singular platform or multiple platforms. This in turn means those systems do not have to be concerned with access control and enables a decoupled architecture eliminating any restrictive dependencies across the tiers.
eRights takes care of answering the question: "Who can access what and under what terms?". Many organisations (OUP included) have untapped revenue streams or development possibilities because of the difficulty in "productising" resources. This system makes this easy. It is used by many publishers because it allows for the creation and maintenance of fine grained and flexible licensing models including products, campaigns, special offers, trial versions and so on.
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With our access rights and license management solutions, service providers can easily try new business models, and easily accommodate a broad range of business relationships.