Hyland Software has been making waves in the enterprise content management (ECM) world, but not all the signals point in the same direction. In recent years, Hyland made aggressive moves to add process and hyperautomation to its product stack with the acquisitions of Another Monday and Alfresco Software in 2020, followed by Nuxeo in 2021. 

Fast forward a few years, and Hyland is almost unrecognizable in terms of leadership. Jitesh Ghai from Informatica was hired as the CEO, Chief Product Officer Leonard Kim came from ADP, two significant leadership changes that all happened within the past 12 months. This executive shakeup, coupled with Hyland’s decision to reduce its global workforce by 20%, has left both customers and industry analysts wondering about Hyland’s next move.

CommunityLive, Hyland’s annual customer event, may have answered some questions by  announcing their move towards a unified platform, the Hyland Content Innovation Cloud, but much of their plans and roadmap remain shrouded in mystery.  What is the timing? How will Hyland continue to support three very different technology stacks, while introducing a fourth cloud-native approach?  What level of support will be provided to those customers remaining on a legacy product? Is this a new platform or just a veneer connecting existing platforms to the cloud? Customers are left wondering what this means for their aging ECM solutions and what they can do to enhance aging interfaces that are becoming more and more difficult and complex to support.

A Solution: Cloud-Based Search Portals

One easy and effective way to modernize the Hyland platform (OnBase, Alfresco, Nuxeo) while mitigating some of the platform’s pain points is to introduce a cloud-based search portal that caches documents and metadata outside of your Hyland repository. This solution provides the ability to search and view documents and content in a modern, streamlined interface while minimizing costs and risks of the aging Hyland platform. For more information on what a Search Portal is, view this blog post, How Search Portals Transform Content Management. The Veladocs Search Portal extends and improves the Hyland implementation in several important 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 natural language searching, column selection, on-click sorting, advanced filtering, and content display without losing search results context, optimize the entire search experience. 
• 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 a complex ECM solution.

Increased Stability and Performance

• Responsiveness – The Veladocs user interface is built with modern tooling, making it more performant and responsive for quickly and efficiently accessing content from a laptop, tablet, or phone. 
• Improved Performance – Removing consumers and the corresponding search queries from the main Hyland repository will improve performance. The performance of search and retrieval is also greatly improved due to the simplification and modernization of the underlying architecture.
• Fault Tolerant – By creating a separate environment, consumers can continue searching for documents even if the primary Hyland repository 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.

Multiple Repository Search

• Multiple Repositories  – Veladocs can ingest content and metadata from multiple repositories, into a single Veladocs instance to facilitate document search across repositories.
• Non-Hyland Repositories – A single Veladocs instance supports ingestion of content and metadata from other non-Hyland repositories as well, such as Documentum, FileNet, SharePoint and network shares. 

Cost Savings

• Reduced Licenses – Implementing a Veladocs Search Portal often allows for optimization of Hyland user licenses.
• 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.  This would remove the need for these users to have access to the Hyland repository 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.
• Pay As You Go  – 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 increased capacity at peak times.  

The Veladocs Playbook

Veladocs brings a fresh approach to content services 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 enhances the search experience by supporting transparent and secure 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 Veladocs 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 legacy OnBase/Alfresco/Nuxeo APIs and database layers. This forward-thinking approach ensures that Veladocs meets current needs and is poised to adapt to future technological advancements.

A Bridge to the Future

For organizations deeply embedded in the Hyland ecosystem – whether that be OnBase, Alfresco or Nuxeo, modernizing without a complete rip-and-replace approach is critical. Introducing a cloud-based search portal offers an efficient way to modernize the user experience and mitigate many of the inherent limitations of OnBase, Alfresco and Nuxeo. Veladocs Search Portal provides a much-needed bridge for organizations waiting to see what direction Hyland takes next.

Please contact us for more information on how this solution could enhance your Hyland ecosystem.