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Enterprise Content Management

Your Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Solution

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has become a key business priority for most organizations. The amount of business information created and shared is increasing in size and speed every day, government compliance requirements are becoming more stringent, and key business tasks require accurate and fast access to records, documents, and other information. Without content management, information becomes chaos – unmanaged, not searchable, and processes rely more on employee institutional memory than technology. Additionally, users waste time looking for or recreating documents and information, and businesses may pay penalties for documents and information that are accidentally lost or released publicly.

Most business executives recognize the need for a robust ECM solution, but most traditional ECM offerings only provide comprehensive, mission-critical content management designed for a small set of users (working with a team, department, or content type) and focus on security and compliance over usability and collaboration. Enterprise Content Management with Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010 delivers both a high quality solution that stimulates and delivers user participation, and the tools for highly secure, well-managed content.

SharePoint Server 2010 enables companies to democratize content management and improve organizations by providing content management to all employees and compliance across all documents. This leads to better, faster, and more secure processes that can be managed through a familiar environment, integrated into business collaboration infrastructure, and built on a trusted and extensible platform. With ECM in SharePoint Server, you can:

• Drive participation - Avoid chaos and end-user resistance
• Ensure Compliance - Avoid risk by controlling unmanaged content, including Social content
• Save Costs - Avoid high costs of point solutions, especially where not needed.

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An Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system helps businesses manage all data, including:

• Structured data captured in LOB systems, such as CRM, ERP, or Sales databases, and
• Unstructured data including all documents, spreadsheets, and other files.

According to The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), “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.” ECM is both broad and deep. It must provide core management for the full lifecycle of information from inception to archive (or deletion), while providing deeper control in one or a few specific areas. A full ECM solution must provide a platform for some or all of the following, based on organizational needs:

• Document Management
• Records Management
• Web Content Management
• Rich Media Management
• Archiving and Library Services
• Human Centric Workflow
• Business Process Management
• Transactional Content Management
• Scanning (Image and Capture)
• Document Output Management
• Customer Communications Management
• E-Mail Archiving

Enterprise Content Management helps bring structure out of chaos, and helps maintain order when the structure becomes too big. ECM can cover both unstructured and structured data for an organization, and avoid the chaos of unmanaged and unchecked content development that leads to duplication, rework, and wasted time and money. However, even ECM systems can return to chaos if allowed to flood with documents and records. ECM systems should include retention policies, which handle data and documents after a specified time, to move that information to a backup location or delete the files.

Note: See complete article in our Case Studies
Source: The Business Value of Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010 ECM

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