Web, mobile and email communications are now the norm for your customers, partners and co-workers. That creates a challenge for many organizations, who find adapting core business applications to work with new digital channels highly complex and time consuming.
Columbus offers a simpler, more cost-effective approach that involves no changes to your IT systems or IBM i applications. The software transforms your existing output - including spool and data files - into new, enhanced digital formats to support initiatives such as customer communication management, eInvoicing and customer self-service, without impacting on existing operations.
Additionally, Columbus can be used as a final resting place for decommissioned application data. It can be used to store any data from any application running on any platform, onto the IBM i, together with unstructured content such as documents, images, videos, email, chat and sound recordings.
With your business data stored securely in a Columbus content repository, you can make GDPR compliance easier by setting automatic retention and deletion rules, monitoring data access by internal company users, customers and business partners, and incorporating additional security processes such as encryption, redaction, masking and obfuscation. All information is stored centrally and archived securely in line with your corporate retention policies.
Features
A simpler, more cost-effective approach to opening up new digital channels that involves no changes to your existing IT systems or applications.
Universal data capture
Documents and data from any application, on any platform, can be captured automatically and stored alongside office documents, emails and scanned images; a '360 degree’ view of all correspondence for each customer supports efficient customer service.
Dynamic transformation
Your stored content is converted automatically into standard formats for online presentment and print delivery. Additionally, transformation to XML enables content to be exchanged directly with other business application interfaces.
Information lifecycle management
An integral document lifecycle manager allows you to implement retention periods to ensure timely deletion at end of life, to meet your regulatory archiving obligations; for documents that change regularly, a complete revision history is maintained, with full version control.
Security and auditing
Document encryption, versioning and auditing combine with user-level and document-level security to control access to your confidential data and ensure compliance with statutory mandates and directives.
Flexible access
Web and mobile interfaces can be tailored to fit your target audience and corporate branding, and published integration APIs provide seamless coupling with existing business applications.
Ease of use
You can easily locate information using index and free text searches, and process and approve documents using workflow indexes; additionally, users can annotate, email, print and export documents.
Data mining made simple
A dynamic indexing feature allows authorized users to analyze content from your entire document history and export the results to external reporting systems for further analysis.
Enterprise architecture
Columbus is designed to service millions of users and can store billions of documents and other digital artifacts, in an efficient, performant and compressed format.
Stress-free storage
At the heart of Columbus is a file-based, segmented storage architecture that makes backup very straightforward.
Related products, solutions and news
Enterprise content management
