Enterprise Content Management Systems

An enterprise Content Management or Enterprise CMS as it is popularly called these days is a computer application package designed to manage the publishing of digital print and other electronic content of the information of an organization.

Data and information are the key resource of an organization and to use them optimally and efficiently the organization of these two things gains a prime importance. The Enterprise Content Management facilitates development of tools and strategies to effectively collect, store, “channelize”, manage and process the information and deliver a well managed documentation related to the organizational process.

The term Enterprise Content Management was coined in around year 2000 by Association for Information and Image Management or AIIM. The term has been interpreted and defined in many ways since then but the most generic all encompassing definition was provided by AIIM in early 2008 which explicitly states that Enterprise Content Management is a set of tools and strategies used to effectively collect, manage and collaborate the documentation related to organizational process.

The ECM provides features to further develop the intelligent quotient of traditional CMS by providing the necessary infrastructure to provide verticals that can be used to provide adequate architecture for SoA Service Oriented architecture as well as EAI or Enterprise Application Integration deployments.

The interface of Enterprise Content Management has features to provide reporting as well as auditing functions.

The initial companies that sold the idea of ECM basically propagated the concept of Document Management companies. Some leading vendors of the same had been Documentum, Filenet and Opentext. All these companies were of medium size. But now the concept has gained new dimensions with many business mammoths coming in this field to provide state of art documentation management and informatics tool. Oracle, IBM and EMC are the chief vendors of ECM applications.

The ECM also has a rich repository that integrates both the date warehouse database and documentation database. Such set-up provides a smooth and streamlined flow of information across all the departments of the concern. The tool has easy and user- friendly interfaces and does not require any specific IT training to be imparted to users to get them using the application. The true success of Enterprise Content management lies in the fact that the user becomes unaware on what level of abstraction he is working, the ECM chiefly provides such interface that the user is unaware of the application structure.