This post serves as a quick introduction to our project and supplementary information about our poster. Team ReptileRepo is working with Raytheon Technologies to replace their existing enterprise content management (ECM) system with a newer and more modern solution that meets their needs for future development and scalability.
ECM systems are software systems that allow companies to easily store and manage their digital documents. Some examples that you might be familiar with are Microsoft OneDrive or Google Docs. The system that Raytheon needs, however, has much more strict requirements and needs to enable them to securely store their sensitive information.
Our system has to follow the strict access control requirements that Raytheon has provided us. Each user has their own associated groups and security roles. When accessing a file, these roles are checked to ensure that the user has the correct requirements needed in order to access the file.
To describe these security requirements, every file has its own associated metadata. The metadata gives things like the security level, project name, or any additional security information needed for the access control system.
To upload files securely with their associated metadata, the team created a custom file upload application that utilizes the ECM systems’ application programming interface (API). It ensures that all uploaded files have the correct metadata. By ensuring this, the system is guaranteed to correctly assign access control requirements for every file. The team also created a custom frontend web application that interfaces with the backend file upload app to make uploading files much easier for the Raytheon engineers.
Finally, the system is integrated with Microsoft Active Directory, which is where the users and user groups are created and stores. This makes our ECM system much easier to integrate with Raytheon’s existing software and hardware. The system we created currently uses a PostgreSQL database, but it is easily exchangeable for any other database technology (Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, etc.)
