The Benefits of a Unified ECM Platform

Organizations face many challenges with unstructured content creation, management and distribution. Unstructured content can be
anything from paper or electronic documents, presentations, scanned images and spreadsheets to graphics, video, email and ZIP files. Often this content is stored on shared network drives, multiple Web sites, individuals’ laptops, custom applications, FTP sites, hosted servers and applications or even as attachments to emails on network systems.

Organizations have turned to enterprise content management (ECM) software to help them proactively manage content and solve multiple business problems around:

• Policies and procedures;
• ISO certification and other compliance initiatives;
• Material safety and data sheet management; 
• E-government;
• Contract and case management;
• Creation and distribution management of large manuals and training information;
• Intranet consolidation;
• Call center and self-help sites;
• Customer support sites;
• Marketing asset and brand management;
• Video management;
• Partner/dealer extranets;
• Multinational Web presence; and
• Public micro-sites.

The Evolution of Enterprise Content Management

Historically, content management consisted of separate line-of-business applications built on separate applications and platforms. Additionally, these applications were for managing specific content types; for example, one application to manage
documents, another to manage Web sites, a specialized application for managing digital assets and another one for managing records. This led to scenarios in which, for instance, organizations creating human resources portals for managing résumés, policies and procedures purchased document management systems. Then, when they needed to add other functionality, such as records management, or when building new applications to support Web sites, they had to purchase additional software packages on separate servers from different specialized vendors. Compounding the problem, content had to be copied and stored in multiple systems.

Although each type of content requires some unique functionality—such as file plan management for records; robust transformation for video or for digital assets (such as taking Adobe Photoshop files and transforming them to different formats, resolutions, and sizes); and WYSIWYG editors, templates or publishing capabilities for Web sites—all content items share a common set of services and functionality. This set of common functionality includes capabilities such as revision control, security and access controls, search, metadata management and workflow or routing capabilities.

Unified Enterprise Content Management

Unified ECM offers the same set of common functionality in one product for all content types. Any of the other unique content management features can literally be enabled or disabled within the single platform—depending on your business application’s needs. Unified ECM provides the full array of ECM functionality—including document and imaging management, Web content management, digital asset management and records and retention management—on one platform, and eliminates the requirement for integrations between various ECM components.

Benefits of a single user experience—Users want the ability to find content easily, collaborate efficiently, securely store and version content, transform content from one form to another and deploy it wherever it’s needed. A unified architecture offers a
single user experience and graphical user interfaces with a common look and feel—easing training, improving usability,
increasing productivity and producing higher adoption rates for your business solutions.

Benefits of a single platform—Consolidating the overall architecture on a single code base, security model and API eliminates integrations that serve as only a temporary solution. A unified approach enables organizations to leverage a common IT infrastructure, which dramatically reduces implementation and setup times, minimizes application development and support costs, makes upgrades simpler, and allows your administrators and developers to focus on meeting user requirements instead of integration activities.

With unified ECM, enterprise applications can deliver functionality that organizations need, regardless of where one product ends and another begins. As multiple enterprise content management features are enabled, the benefits accrue.

The concept of content management has evolved dramatically over the past decade. Organizations are beginning to see widespread adoption of content management technology across multiple departments within their enterprise and across multiple industries—driving corporate IT to implement an enterprise-wide strategy for managing their unstructured content. With higher user adoption rates, quicker time-to-market and lower implementation costs—unified ECM enables organizations to have great success in their ECM initiatives while taking much larger strides in implementing true enterprisewide content management.