Croatian Radiotelevision (HRT) is a national broadcaster with television and radio stations and 3,000 employees. Its audio and video database includes more than 350,000 videotapes, including footage of national significance. The broadcaster addressed its lack of records management by deploying Content Manager while keeping its legacy applications to reduce training and change management costs. As a result, it now has superior access to content and records and valuable content across a range of devices, in addition to improved enterprise performance, simplified management, and greater accountability.
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Several years ago, Croatian Radiotelevision (HRT) recognized that its audio and video archive lacked a robust records management capability, limiting access and governance of its valuable historic archive of audio, video and newspaper articles. This also reduced the efficiency of administration staff responsible for invoicing, and other critical commercial and legal tasks.
The previous system limited the ability for the producers of media content to find audio, video or newspaper items quickly. Further, the lack of detailed auditing tools also posed risks to the security of HRT’s historical archive, says BCC Services Chief Executive Officer, Ivan Špelić. “They possessed something that was most valuable and there was the threat of it being lost,” Špelić says.
Further complicating matters, users were relying on 10 custom applications connected to a Meridio document management system using the Meridio API. HRT wanted to avoid retraining its staff when moving to a new enterprise content management system.
With the help of BCC, HRT moved its entire broadcast archive and administrative functions to Content Manager – a total of more than 2.5 million records.
Staff members now have more advanced features they can use to search for audio, video, photos, and newspaper articles in the broadcaster’s vast archive. They can search metadata stored in Content Manager as well as search the content of audio, video and newspaper articles. They can also see each item’s lending history and whether an item is currently on loan.
Quick preview controls allow users to see documents without having to download them first, while caching of recently accessed documents means that servers are highly responsive, resulting in faster retrieval of documents.
Content Manager’s responsive web interface allows users to access content such as scanned newspaper articles or audio files on their mobile devices. This saves time by making this information available anywhere.
Benefits are also being seen in HRT’s accounting and legal department, due to the ability to track invoices and contracts. The organization has begun using the system to archive electronic and printed invoices. Various departments, from legal to procurement, can use it to store contracts.
By storing contracts and other items this way, it is much easier to find them, as well as track their status. For example, users could see how long it took for a contract to be signed. Managers can approve contracts using a browser and the system speeds up the approval process by emailing managers when contracts are ready to sign. Access can also be restricted according to users’ security level.
The open architecture of Content Manager was a key benefit of choosing over other solutions, says Boris Kotarski, the Chief Technology Officer at HRT.
“The open architecture of Content Manager enables us to integrate it with other IT systems used by HRT, supporting TV and radio program production, so that one central, integrated platform is used for all document and records management,” Kotarski says.
By connecting Content Manager to existing systems, minimal changes were needed in the end user interface and training costs could be drastically reduced. Existing applications were connected via .NET APIs and web services.
Micro Focus also brought the skills of partner BCC Services Croatia, which took the lead role in migrating and testing the solution. BCC Services has been a market leader in the integration of document and records management solutions in the Adriatic region for more than 20 years, and has many government and enterprise customers. The company was able to perform the migration in a few months, with no negative affect on HRT’s production environment. The final migration of the system from the old production environment to the new one was performed over three separate weekends to minimize any impact to HRT’s operations.
“After years of cooperation that led us to a good understanding of the customer’s environment, we proposed Content Manager to HRT since we felt it was addressing the customers’ needs better than any other solution on the market,” says Špelić.
Not only is HRT seeing the benefits of faster, more accessible search and closer tracking of its archive, it could also eventually move to a single search function across all its data. This is possible using the Micro Focus IDOL big data engine, which underpins the searching capabilities within Content Manager.
By extending the use of IDOL technology, the broadcaster could also search other unstructured data from other systems. IDOL can even index speech based on topics being discussed and the emotional tone being used. The technology can also recognize faces in images, as well as age, expressions and gender.
“I’m confident that Content Manager will, in the future, have an important role in the enhancement of business-critical processes and building new solutions for access to media archive and digital content,” says Kotarski.
