Some common IBM® Content Manager and FileNet® P8 concepts are handled differently by each of the data models.
Content management systems need to manage both content data and metadata. Content data is digital information that has meaning within some business context. Some examples of content data are spread sheets, video clips, and scanned images. Content management systems typically represent content data as a stream of bytes.
Metadata is information that describes the content data. Metadata is typically implemented by content management systems as a collection of discreet data entities that are used to catalog the content data to facilitate searching and business rule enforcement.
In FileNet P8, an object that combines content data with the metadata that describes it is called a document. The IBM Content Manager equivalent of a document is an item.
In FileNet P8, the metadata portion of a document is implemented by a collection of properties. The IBM Content Manager equivalent of the metadata portion of a document is an attribute.
In FileNet P8, different types of documents are identified by class definitions. The IBM Content Manager equivalent is an item type. Item types define what attributes are associated with an item of a specific type. In addition to identifying attributes, the item type also defines other item features and functions, such as:
In FileNet P8, the content data portion of a document is represented by a collection of content elements. The IBM Content Manager equivalent of a content element is a document part.
In FileNet P8, two objects can be related by using an object property, which takes a reference to a specific type of object as its value. The IBM Content Manager equivalent of an object property is a reference attribute.
Both FileNet P8 and IBM Content Manager support document versioning. Versioning is the practice of updating a document with a new version instead of replacing the existing version. By using a new version every time a change is made, a history of all the changes is preserved as a series of document versions.
FileNet P8 always requires a new version of a document whenever you update the content. However, a new version is not required if you update only the document properties.
IBM Content Manager sometimes requires a new version when content or metadata is updated, depending on the version policy that is specified on the item type.
Resource items are a category of IBM Content Manager items types that do not have a separate version policy for content and attributes. For resource items, the content version is controlled by the metadata attribute policy.