ECM: A View into the Future
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. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists AIIM
The administration, use, and storage of electronic information independent of originator, location, format, purpose and time is one of the central challenges of our generation. The past decades have seen rapid advances in technologies for generating, processing and distributing information. Information management, by contrast, has been largely ignored by sheer comparison.
Enterprise Content Management makes manual file storage and traditional data processing easy and complete. It involves gathering unstructured, decrepit structured and structured information in one fold. Firms, multinationals, government agencies and other organizations are face with this issue. When there are no immediate plans to implement such a system, it sneaks into the organization of its own pact with the next server license update, with the next office software suite, with the next company database or software upgrade.
In many companies with heterogeneous IT landscapes, issues like what redundant functionalities of services/products are either idle or not used seem more important to them than investing in a new software product.
Keeping control over a company's information is very important. This brings to the many thousands of e-mails, on-line transactions, electronic business correspondence web contents and other documents generated by organizations on a daily basis where do to store them, how to sort them, how to keep compliance document, tax-relevant information, and how to transfer information from the disorganized file system to repository that every staff can used according to access level, how to make sure that no information meant for the system is lost or ignored due processing, etc.
Document management solution plays an important role in answering the questions put forward.
ECM solution is the answer.
ECM solution can help organizations consolidate diverse content from multiple file shares and personal drives into a centrally managed repository with consistent categorization.
ECM solutions also help to manage multiple websites, meet legal and compliance requirements, satisfy content management, etc.
Security technologies play an important part of the cross-section functionalities that are available to all ECM components. For example, electronic signatures are used not only when documents are sent, but also in data capture via scanning, in order to document the completeness of the capture.
There are lots of ECM solution vendors that an organization can choose from according to their requirement, since some of the vendors can provide customized solution to meet the organization objectives.
OpenText, Interwoven, and Vignette remain the three primary independent ECM vendors with OpenText far outpacing Interwoven and Vignette in terms of revenue and customer base, other ECM vendors includes Computhink's ViseWise, IBM's Filenet, EMC's Documentum, laserfiche, Microsoft Office SharePoint server 2007, Xerox Docushare, etc.
ECM open source that are also available includes options offer by Nuxeo, Alfresco, Knowledge Tree, jumper, Sense/Net, and others.
Estimates that the ECM market is worth approximately $2.9 billion in 2007, and this is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.9% through 2011 according to Gartner.
Organization trying to control and structure their information should consider the organizational needs and staff requirements before deciding on a particular solution.
A reasonable long-term migration strategy removes the fear of quick and rapid technology.
An organization that uses this solution find it easier to control the mountain of uncontrolled information generated daily before it gets bigger.
ECM - Enterprise Content Management should be a part of every modern IT infrastructure." Ulrich Kampffmeyer.
ECM will continue to absorb other technologies.