The advent of Content Management Systems (CMS) which later evolved into ECM or Enterprise Content Management has added a whole new element to Enterprise Software. It is one of the hot spots these days and justifiably so due to the impact it has on enterprise information. In this information age, if 1.0 saw the arrival of Google and search engines that could search and display structured and unstructured data, the next step in evolution was CMS that could organize, store, deliver, manage and report on different types of content.
Digital content can be of several types, categorized at a high level into Web, Documents and Images. Early days CMS products focused on storing web content into databases, providing templates for display as web pages and enabling workflow for publishing such content. While the basics of any CMS or ECM system still remain the same, there are additional types of content such as emails, Records and dimensions such as Collaboration, Taxonomy, multiple Repositories, tight integration with business productivity applications (such as MS Office) that have come into play.
Document Imaging which was earlier a distinct industry segment is increasingly being integrated into the ECM space as Enterprise Content Management itself has become a more important and larger part of Information Lifecycle Management. Documents are usually scanned and in some cases converted to text by OCR.
In the nascent stages of Content Management, CMS vendors made products and solutions way too costly, complex and needed too much customization to be of use, as a result the value proposition was not justifiable. The industry has matured now, ECM products are highly affordable, easy to implement and most features are readily available out-of-the box. Solutions are a lot more standardized, flexible and interoperable. Part of this could also be attributed to the fact that several key components such as workflow, search etc.. are being offered through specialty product engines bundled into the end product rather than being developed by the ECM vendors themselves.
The ECM market has several players, some of the more popular ones being Interwoven, Vignette/OpenText, Documentum, Filenet, Sharepoint, Alfresco. It is important also to realize that several vendors provide either Web content management or Document content management but not both, there are some excellent products though in either category.
Like in every other enterprise software, there are proprietary, open source and commercial open source providers in the ECM market too. As to choice of a CMS, factors such as Features, Technology, Cost and Support play a vital part in the determination. From the Technology perspective, customers watch out for the underlying programming language, support for Operating systems, Web servers, Application servers and Databases. Most Content Management products these days are written in Java, PHP or .Net.
The advent of Content Management Systems (CMS) which later evolved into ECM or Enterprise Content Management has added a whole new element to Enterprise Software. It is one of the hot spots these days and justifiably so due to the impact it has on enterprise information. In this information age, if 1.0 saw the arrival of Google and search engines that could search and display structured and unstructured data, the next step in evolution was CMS that could organize, store, deliver, manage and report on different types of content.
Tags: CMS, Content Management, Content Management Systems, ECM, Enterprise Content Management
