By Paul Edwards, Co-Founder & Product Manager, SynApps Solutions

Last time we spoke, I started to explain about the problem audit trail users can have with Enterprise Content Management systems; how they do a very useful job, but can get ‘clogged up’ over time, as they record so much data that gets pushed into a database in a way that often makes it hard to work with, plus starts to impair the performance of the overall system – as it often comprises millions of tables after a year or two of serious enterprise use.

Hence our release this quarter of a new addition to the ConXApps) family of products; ConXAudit, which takes that growing audit trail data pile and turns it into a highly indexed form that is not only a lot easier to work with (especially via our graphical front end, which makes it really simple to interrogate the audit log to see who did what with which document) but also removes the audit database’s drag on the ECM (be it Documentum or Alfresco) in terms of overall daily performance.

Another benefit of porting your ECM audit trail to ConXAudit is that it will make it a lot, lot quicker to restore the system should you ever need to – or, indeed, move your work to a different ECM platform, when and if you should need to do that.

I also mentioned that we are helping an early ConXAudit customer work though the issues their huge – 65 million row! – audit database is giving them. That customer is a major transport facility that wants to upgrade to the latest version of its chosen ECM, but which was worried this audit data issue would complicate this process (or not allow it to keep all of the data it really needed, which is a potential compliance headache further down the road).

The great news is that that issue has gone away. Another benefit is that the team says that the amount of time needed to work with audit data has dropped, quite dramatically, since it moved the data into ConXAudit.

That’s because of the wide range of data presentation formats that the app offers, from pie charts and other sorts of statistical analysis tools; you are getting a whole new dashboard piping important usage and security information to you that you would have struggled to get before. And in the case of this early customer work with ConXAudit audit, the team there has told us it actually intends one large display in the support office with a rolling dashboard view displaying system usage as a way of promoting the value of the ECM platform internally.

So, as you can probably tell, I am really excited by ConXAudit, as it solves a problem in convincing ways that will genuinely help ECM users.

Find out more about ConXAudit here, and contact the SynApps ConX team today to start streamlining your ECM audit trail.