The CARA Life Sciences Platform is the next-generation solution for content and data management from Generis, released May 2021. As a Certified CARA partner, we provide an overview of features that excite us most.
Our technical team decided to take a look under the hood to gauge what features might be most beneficial to our life sciences customers. Here are the ones we felt were the most helpful, interesting and, quite frankly, cool.
Feature 1: Content Storage Independence
Moving to Cloud-Based Storage
Historically in Enterprise Content Management (ECM), content is stored in SAN or NAS within the customer network, creating substantial resource dependencies—including infrastructure support, hardware support and more. Additionally, upgrades to these hardware platforms were complicated and costly.
As of CARA version 5.2 (released in December of 2020), content can be stored in any cloud vendor solution. CARA 5.3, by default, comes with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Box connectors that provide customers with the choice to select cloud per their requirements. It also allows the extension of the CARA API to build custom cloud connectors. In life sciences, top cloud vendors such as Box and Amazon also now support GxP solutions.
The flexibility for customers to select the cloud platform of their choice is a huge benefit.
Feature 2: Platform/RDBMS Server Independence
Moving to Elastic Search
Typically, ECMs are heavily dependent on platform and RDBMS (relational database management system) servers to handle business logic and store metadata and indexes. All of these inherit resource, maintenance and cost constraints.
CARA 5.2 introduced elastic search capabilities. Elastic search is a leading, scalable, open search and analytics engine that can search on petabytes of data stored on object stores like Amazon S3 in minutes. Elastic search replaces platform and RDBMS server technologies.
CARA 5.3 uses JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) formatted files to store metadata and feed into elastic search. The JSON files contain both documents with any metadata properties.
Elastic search gives life science organizations more resource, maintenance and cost freedom compared to platform and RDBMS server technologies.
Feature 3: Quick & Advanced Search
The Daelight team went through the exercise of configuring Quick Search and Advanced Search in CARA 5.3. We were impressed with the flexibility CARA provides.
Feature 4: Easy Configuration
During a migration project from Documentum to CARA, a customer requested the configuration of 300+ virtual folder structures to closely mimic folders in the source system.
Thanks to CARA 5.2’s dictionary configuration of flexible folder structures, this was easily built. Additionally, configurations can be exported to YML files and reimported back with small tweaks, saving considerable amount of time setting up test and production environments.
What would typically be a herculean time-consuming effort was completed by CARA experts in a short amount of time.
Conclusion
These four features will make a difference for life sciences content management. Our team was impressed with the features of the latest release of CARA and the ease in which the platform can be configured.
We look forward to seeing what comes next from Generis!
ABOUT GENERIS
Generis is a developer of world-class Content and Regulatory Information Management technology for regulated industries globally. Eight of the top 10 global life sciences companies rely on Generis’ flagship Intelligent Content Services platform, CARA™ for critical document and information management, including AbbVie, AstraZeneca, Biogen, Gilead, Bayer, Pfizer, and Merck KGaA. Today Generis serves more than half a million users worldwide, across use cases ranging from RIM, Regulatory / R&D and Safety use cases to Clinical, Non-clinical, Quality GxP, CMC, Pharmacovigilance, Medical Information / Medical Affairs applications and more. More at generiscorp.com.
GENERIS & DAELIGHT
Daelight Solutions and Generis have been partners since 2019 with the goal of improving life sciences professionals’ access to data. As more and more life sciences companies deploy CARA, Daelight is equipped to audit needs, migrate systems, and quickly implement the platform—all while reducing costs and maintaining compliance.