Recently I have been providing quite a lot of advice to customers who want to embed TRIM tightly within their enterprise information topology and automate their information flow as much as possible.  I think it would help many of you to understand what tools are available to create a truly unified information management experience.

For the technically minded among you, HP TRIM provides a software development kit (SDK) which allows integration from COM based legacy applications, .NET languages, and through a Web Service in service oriented architectures (SOA).

And now I try to use a few less three letter acronyms (TLAs). Basically these integration tools allow your programmers to write software code to automate the same functions that your users perform in the HP TRIM interface.  This way you can reduce the impact of recordkeeping on your users as much as possible. I have seen many customers who have integrated HP TRIM with line of business applications to automatically capture or present documents and records at defined points in a process. I have also seen extreme cases where independent software vendors have created completely new line of business applications on top of the HP TRIM platform. Because all the business rules of HP TRIM are inherent in the integration tools, these applications are automatically compliant with corporate records management policies.

In addition to making the HP TRIM functionality available to programmers, the SDK also provides the ability to reach out to other applications and to extend the existing HP TRIM functionality through the following mechanisms:

External Link - This mechanism is the easiest way to call an external application and doesn't even require you to write code.  You simply define the path to the external application and what command line parameters you want to pass to it. The command line parameters can be dynamically extracted on execution based on metadata from any selected HP TRIM object. A example use case is where a planning authority stores the map coordinates of building applications against the property record in HP TRIM and uses them as command line parameters for an External Link to a geographical information system.  The users can view a property record in HP TRIM and press a button to start the GIS system and show the property on the map.

Field Add-In - This mechanism allows you to write code to query external systems or databases during record cretion in HP TRIM. You can use it to validate entries of metadata or automatically populate metadata in HP TRIM record profiles. An example use case of this is where an organization uses a field add-in to retrieve the staff ID from an HR application when they profile personnel files in HP TRIM.

Records/Base Object Add-in - This mechanism allows you to execute your own code when your users create or modify records or other objects in TRIM. You got different events at which you can execute your code, such as object initialization, pre-save, post-save, delete. A use case of this is where an organization wants to update a customer relationship management system whenever a customer correspondence is filed in HP TRIM.

Custom Event Processor - This mechanism allows your code to be notified of every single audit event in HP TRIM and to execute functionality accordingly. I have used this mechanism myself to remove copies of records in external systems whenever the original record in TRIM was destroyed.

Now that you are aware of the possibilities, you can let your creativity run wild!  HP TRIM makes sure that you can't break the records management rules when you use the tools. 

If you want assistance with your integrations, our professional services organization has some very creative and proficient HP TRIM SDK specialists.