What is Enterprise Content Management?

Enterprise content management (ECM) refers to the technologies, strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to an organization and its processes.

We are going to cover following topics in this article:

1. Definition of ECM

2. Why ECM?

3. Different components of ECM

4. Major ECM players

Definition: As per AIIM(Association for Information and Image Management) http://www.aiim.org/what-is-ecm-enterprise-content-management.aspx, “Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes”

Why ECM: As content volume is growing at 200% annually, it becomes difficult to manage and retrieve content. This reduces the overall throughput of an organization. There are more specific benefits of ECM, those are:

Different components of ECM: There are five ECM components and technologies of the ECM model were first defined by AIIM as follows:

• capture
• manage
• store
• preserve
• deliver

Capture: The “Capture” category contains functionalities and components for generating, capturing, preparing and processing analog and electronic information.

Capture Content

Manage: The “Manage” category contains functionality for managing content so that retrieval of content is faster. It also ensure that all the task performed on content are tracked.

Manage Content

Store: “Store” components are used for the temporary storage of information which it is not required or desired to archive.

Store Content

Preserve: The “Preserve” components of ECM handle the long-term, safe storage and backup of static, unchanging information, as well as temporary storage of information that it is not desired or required to archive. This is sometimes called “electronic archiving,” but that has substantially broader functionality than that of “Preserve.” Electronic archiving systems today generally consist of a combination of administration software like records management, imaging or document management, library services (IRS — information retrieval system) and storage subsystems.

Deliver: The “Deliver” components of ECM are used to present information from the “Manage,” “Store,” and “Preserve” components. They also contain functions used to enter information in systems (such as information transfer to media or generation of formatted output files) or for readying (for example converting or compressing) information for the “Store” and “Preserve” components.

Deliver Content

Major ECM Players:

1. IBM

2. Documentum

3. Opentext

4. Microsoft Sharepoint

5. Interwoven

This is all about ECM basics, but I would surely bring more about ECM components and usage in my next article. Your feedback, comments and suggestion are highly appreciated.

References:

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_content_management