Veeva is an ECM SaaS solution that has made significant inroads into the life sciences community in the last decade. The Veeva Vault suite of products are specifically configured to support multiple life sciences use cases. This laser focus coupled with a fully managed SaaS offering has persuaded many life science customers to embrace the Veeva platform. While Veeva has removed the burden of managing a complex and dated ECM infrastructure, the functionality and interfaces accessed by end users are just as complex as legacy ECM platforms. Managing regulated content still does not have an “easy button.” 

Veeva manages the content and data from Research and Development through all product development phases and processes including Clinical, Medical, Quality, Safety, Regulatory and Commercial. So it is not surprising that these systems are complex, highly important, accessed by a majority of employees, and very expensive from a license and maintenance perspective. Additionally, external organizations, such as Clinical Research Organizations (CROs), require secure access to this content. 

One successful method employed by our customers to enhance Veeva and control costs is implementing a search portal. The search portal is a cache of documents and metadata that resides outside of the Veeva repository for view only access. The Docuvela team has been implementing search portal applications for customers across many industries since 2005, and Veladocs is a robust, cost-effective search portal for Veeva customers.  

In this post, we introduce the concept of a search portal, explore how a search portal can enrich a Veeva implementation and reduce costs, and share how we continue to further improve the search portal approach with Veladocs.

What is a Search Portal?

A Search Portal is a secure, read-only interface that provides streamlined access to your documents and data that are stored in Veeva. It creates a cache of your documents and data, outside of Veeva that are accessible via a web-based application that is hosted in the cloud, allowing users to search, retrieve, and view content without accessing Veeva or altering the original data or content. This solution ensures that your valuable information is easily accessible to users who need read-only access, while maintaining the integrity and security of the content and data.

An example  architecture for a search portal is depicted in the diagram below:

Veeva data and full-text indexing are stored in OpenSearch, and document content is published to Amazon S3. Users wishing to search and view content utilize the Veladocs web-based interface to find and view content and data. Security can optionally be cached to ensure users only access content and data to which they have been granted access.  The diagram above assumes an AWS installation, but the solution can also be deployed into Azure as well.

Benefits of a Veeva Search Portal

The Veladocs Search Portal enhances Veeva implementations in several ways:

Simplified User Interface

• Simple Search and View – The search interface is designed to make searching intuitive, allowing end users frictionless access to their content. Features such as column selection, on-click sorting, advanced filtering, and content display without losing search results context, and optimize the entire search experience. 
• Enhanced Search – Because Veladocs is a cloud-first solution, it is easy to leverage cloud services  such as Amazon Comprehend to provide natural language searching. These modern search services make content easier to discover, especially for the casual user.
• Minimal Training – The Veladocs simplified interface is often rolled out to content consumers (read-only users) with minimal user training.  Most users don’t even know the content originated in Veeva.

Increased Stability and Performance

• Fault Tolerant – By creating a separate environment, consumers can continue searching for documents even if Veeva is unavailable for upgrades, maintenance, or other unforeseen events.  AWS Outposts can be utilized should companies need to ensure that the Veladocs Search Portal is accessible even when broader network and internet access is down due to a catastrophic failure or event.
• Responsiveness – The Veladocs user interface is built with modern tooling, making it more performant and responsive for quickly and efficiently accessing content. 
• Scalable to Support Billions of Objects – As a cloud-native offering, Veladocs was built from the ground up to seamlessly support storing and searching across billions of objects. Each architecture component is scalable up and down, ensuring performance is never compromised.
• Improved Performance – Removing consumers and the corresponding search queries from the main Veeva instance will improve Veeva’s performance.

Search Multiple Vaults 

• Multiple Veeva Vaults  – Multiple Veladocs.Sync instances can push content to a single Veladocs instance to facilitate document search across Veeva Vaults..
• Non-Veeva Repositories – Since the Veladocs UI does not know the source system, this solution extends to support other non-Veeva repositories as well (Documentum, OpenText, etc.). 

Veeva Cost Savings

• Reduced Veeva Licenses – Implementing a Veladocs Search Portal often allows for reducing the number of Veeva Vault licenses. Users requiring read-only access to content can now access content through Veladocs and do not require a Veeva license.
• 3rd-Party Content Access – Veladocs Search Portal can be installed in an external-facing environment, making it possible to share content and information with third-party consumers (CRO’s ,etc.).  This would remove the need for these users to have access to Veeva or the corporate VPN.
• Tiered Storage Support – The Veladocs Search Portal supports storing content in any of the AWS synchronous storage tiers. In the future, asynchronous storage tiers will also be supported. Moving content to lower-cost storage tiers can save companies tens of thousands of dollars monthly. Archived content and data could be permanently moved to Docuvela and long-term AWS/Azure storage tiers, saving on Veeva storage costs.
• Scalability – Since Veladocs is serverless and cloud-first, it is scalable both up and down, ensuring that companies can support peak performance times, but only pay for what they use.  

The Veladocs Playbook

Veladocs brings a fresh approach to the Search Portal model with its innovative cloud-first strategy. Here’s a closer look at why Veladocs is defining a new standard:

• Simpler Architecture – Veladocs leverages a cloud-services architecture, significantly simplifying the deployment and upkeep of the search portal over a more complex server-based approach. This streamlined approach not only reduces the technical burden on IT teams but also ensures a more reliable and efficient system. The simplicity of cloud-based solutions makes them inherently more robust and easier to manage, allowing organizations to focus on leveraging the data rather than wrestling with infrastructure complexities.

• Scalability – One key advantage of Veladocs’ cloud-first design is its scalability. As the data and usage needs of organizations expands, Veladocs can seamlessly scale up or down to meet these demands. This flexibility ensures that the search portal remains responsive and cost-effective, regardless of the volume of data being processed.

• Transparent Access to Metadata and Content – Veladocs enables streamlined content integration by supporting transparent access to metadata and content through both native AWS APIs and its own Veladocs APIs. This transparency in accessing data ensures seamless integration with a wide range of systems and platforms, making it easier to incorporate the Veladocs content and data that has been cashed from Veeva into existing workflows and systems. 

• AI Readiness – Artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities are becoming increasingly crucial in today’s data-driven world. Veladocs is designed with AI readiness in mind. LLMs and other AI services can natively access content and data in S3 and OpenSearch, rather than require custom integrations through proprietary API and database layers. This forward-thinking approach ensures that Veladocs meets current needs and is poised to adapt to future technological advancements.

• Support for Non GxP Content – Veladocs can also be leveraged to support all of the non GxP content that life sciences companies need to manage. Veeva is not set up to store non GxP content and actively encourages customers to other platforms to manage this content. Most legacy ECM systems are too costly and complex to maintain for the sole purpose of managing non-GxP content and SharePoint doesn’t provide enough controls. Veladocs’is ideal for fulfilling this gap and providing the typical document management functionality (versioning, workflow, etc.), all on a modern cloud-services architecture with a lightweight footprint.

Make Veeva Better Today!

Veeva customers often need help controlling high licensing costs and simplifying how end users find and access the content they need. Veladocs offers a Search Portal solution based on a read-only cache of documents and metadata outside the Veeva repository that is solely focused on simplifying the search experience. This approach streamlines user interaction, minimizes training, and enhances performance and scalability. 

With its cloud-first design, Veladocs provides the added benefits of simplifying integrations, transparent access to metadata and content, and making Veeva content AI-ready — ensuring it meets current and future technological needs while reducing costs and improving efficiency.

Contact us for more information on how a Veeva Search Portal  can enhance your ECM ecosystem.