PARIS and BOSTON, MA -- (Marketwire) -- 06/10/10 -- Serimax, an international full service welding company, has implemented a knowledge management application based on Nuxeo's open source ECM platform, ensuring its global workforce is equipped with secure, accurate access to corporate know-how. With 800 people across seven countries, Serimax plans, designs, manages and provides fully integrated offshore welding solutions in the most extreme conditions and challenging environments.

Serimax engineering and welding teams often work on sites that have little or no network access available, presenting difficulty for onsite teams needing to access technical documents created by the company experts from all over the world. Nuxeo Galaxy Partner Smile, a systems integrator specialized in open source solutions, oversaw development of the knowledge management project, which addresses both strategic and technological challenges.

Serimax defined three key requirements for the project:

• the KM application must be centralized, yet accessible by every Serimax employee on the basis of his/her access rights;
• the KM application should be available both online and offline;
• the KM application should be based on an open source solution to enable evolutions and avoid vendor and integrator lock-in.

Serimax chose Nuxeo Document Management (DM) and Smile to design and implement its knowledge management application with both online and offline access -- a key feature made possible by the robustness and flexibility inherited from Nuxeo's flagship platform: Nuxeo Enterprise Platform (Nuxeo EP).

Two innovative characteristics of the Serimax KM application

• Protection of Intellectual Property with offline local data encryption. Before deploying the KM application, when Serimax teams went into a field engagement on a welding site, they had to carry many hard disk drives and data CDs in order to have all required documents at hand when network access was unavailable. They ran the risk of losing CDs or HDDs and leaking the company's valuable intellectual property. With the KM application, encryption of offline data together with user authentication allowed secure access exclusively from a Serimax-authorized machine, protecting the company against risk.
• Extension of the notion of Knowledge Workers: document management outside of the traditional office setting. The Serimax KM application demonstrates that knowledge workers are no longer exclusively limited to office workers. For Serimax, the KM application's main users are chiefs of maintenance and welders, the company's true experts. This trend will continue to grow, and both KM and document management applications will have to adapt in order to follow the experts in the field. The flexibility and modularity of the Nuxeo platform are key in this respect, allowing the development of content applications from light weight to complex, embedded on a wide range of devices from desktop to mobile.

Elodie Penet, the Serimax Document Supervisor, is very pleased with the application. "Users warmly welcomed the benefits they've realized from the application. Soon, we'll be able to identify internal specialists and expertise across domains, thanks to the knowledge and discussions our employees can contribute," said Penet.

The flexibility of an Open Source solution

At the initial phase of the project, Nuxeo DM met all of Serimax's requirements except one: the offline client feature. However, Serimax was assured that it was part of the Nuxeo roadmap -- for the following year. Serimax, Smile and Nuxeo's teams took this opportunity to work together to fully define the feature and fast-track development to meet Serimax's requirements.

Today, the offline client feature has been integrated into Nuxeo DM. The integration of this important new feature, made possible by the flexibility inherited from Nuxeo EP, the underlying foundation of Nuxeo DM, also relies on Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform). With an embedded lightweight web server, the offline client ensures a user experience very similar to the one users are accustomed to with their standard web browser interface.

About Serimax

Serimax is an international full service welding company, which plans, designs, manages and provides fully integrated offshore welding solutions in the most extreme conditions and challenging environments. Serimax has sales and operational centres in seven countries; in France (Villepinte, Mitry-Mory and Villers-Cotterêts), in Scotland (Evanton and Aberdeen), in the US (Houston), in Singapore, in Malaysia (Pasir Gudang), in Russia (Meshkovo), and most recently in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro). www.serimax.com

About Smile

Founded in 1991, Smile is the leading integrator of open source solutions in France. The company explores the best solutions for content management, portals, business intelligence, CRM, document management, e-commerce, and system tools, while developing best practices that include a large palette of tools. Smile posted revenues of EUR 20.5 million in 2009, with 340 employees in 9 offices: Paris, Lyon (France), Nantes (France), Bordeaux (France), Montpellier (France), Barcelona (Spain), Kiev (Ukraine), Geneva (Switzerland) and Casablanca (Morocco). www.smile.fr

About Nuxeo

Nuxeo provides a modular, extensible open source ECM platform for managing information. A pioneer in the open source ECM market, Nuxeo is used by hundreds of customers worldwide, including The Press Association, Agence France-Presse (AFP), EllisDon and Cengage. Companies of all sizes across all industries, including media, government, transportation, education and energy sectors, use the Nuxeo Enterprise Content Management offerings to meet their specific vertical and horizontal content application needs. Support, training and professional consulting services are available to customers and partners worldwide. Headquartered in Paris, the company has global offices in North America (Boston), Western Europe (Paris, Madrid and Rome), Eastern Europe (Moscow) and the Middle East (Dubai). More information is available at www.nuxeo.com.