It’s hard to imagine life without the technology that is now the de facto standard. How did you manage without a cell phone? A computer? Even as recently as the late 1990’s, typewriters were a prevalent technology on college campuses.

Today, content management solutions specifically designed for the enterprise are a must-have technology. Enterprise content management (ECM) tools and strategies help organizations capture, organize, store, retrieve, and collaborate on all the paper and digital property they own. In addition ECM allows groups to manage unstructured information, wherever that information exists.

ECM Rewards—Everybody Wins
From healthcare, to education, government, manufacturing, and even small to medium-sized business, content management (CM) benefits many industries. When it comes to managing content, "Every department in every industry has a need for CM," states Jim Thumma, VP of sales and marketing, Optical Image Technology, Inc. (OIT). The ECM market is broad, so there is some confusion about what constitutes ECM. "Acronyms get thrown around so much, and as an industry we have made it such a broad sort of thing. It’s very challenging," adds Thumma.

Whitney Tidmarsh, VP, marketing, EMC Corporation notes a recent application from customer Boeing Aircraft. The company used ECM tools to organize aircraft maintenance manuals—making life easier for everyone.

Repairs are normally made by a technician with the guidance of a preprinted manual in a binder, but there are problems with the use of a printed manual. Part numbers change all of the time. Manuals frequently get oil-stained, damaged, misplaced, or lost. It is difficult to appropriately service the planes without the current, legible manual.

"Boeing Aircraft does all of that electronically now, with no printed paper," notes Tidmarsh. "Based on the part number that they are using for repairs, they automatically reconfigure or regenerate the maintenance manual."

Whether a Boeing technician is working on an aircraft from American Airlines or Delta, with the aid of EMC’s ECM, they can now electronically access the appropriate service manual quickly, efficiently, and safely.

ECM offers control over content and processes. "As unstructured content grows, organizations need to capture, store, integrate, and deliver all forms of content across their business," notes Martyn Christian, VP, IBM Enterprise Content Management. "By controlling content and automating business processes, companies can offer better visibility and accountability into their business processes."

"IBM’s Enterprise Content Management portfolio provides the right combination of content and business process management to improve workforce productivity and customer service in a global, enterprise environment," continues Christian.

ECM helps organizations smoothly shuttle projects through the entire lifecycle. Cheryl McKinnon, director, Collaborative Content Management, Open Text Corporation, tells us that Open Text’s LiveLink ECM solution works throughout the lifecycle of a project, "Organizations are able to meet a very wide range of concentric business processes right from that initial drafted version of collaborative work." The natural lifecycle, as McKinnon explains, includes stages such as the review and approval process, publication mode, through its useful life, to its record state and long term archival.

Vendor Highlights
Several vendors, including EMC, IBM, and Open Text, are frequent top performers in leading research data, such as Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and Forrester Wave. Here, some industry-leading ECM vendors share product highlights and coming enhancements.

EMC

EMC offers its flagship Documentum product line together with products that the company brands as Captiva and Document Sciences.

Some of Documentum’s standout benefits include a unified architecture, a rich set of services from repository to content manipulation and business process services, and heterogeneous platform support. Documentum also provides unique support for information lifecycle management (ILM) by seamlessly moving content between tiered storage platforms based on business rules and compliance needs.

"EMC is the only vendor providing a completely integrated information infrastructure stack including storage, storage/network management, virtualization, security, backup and recovery, and ECM," states Tidmarsh.

EMC launched a Web 2.0-based, light document management and collaboration tool this summer. It is available as a free, downloadable Essentials Version and a fee-based Enterprise Version with additional features.

IBM

"IBM ECM delivers a broad set of

mission-critical solutions that help solve today’s most difficult business challenges—managing unstructured content, optimizing business processes, and helping satisfy complex compliance requirements through an integrated information infrastructure," states Christian. "More than 13,000 global companies, organizations, and governments rely on IBM ECM to improve performance and remain competitive through innovation."

IBM recently unveiled enhancements to the IBM Content Management 8.4 family of software, designed to provide improved performance, scalability, and usability.

"IBM Content Management 8.4 features new capabilities that help organizations better manage, access, and integrate critical business information," says Christian. "This includes the IBM Web Interface for Content Management (WEBi) V1.02, an interactive client allowing users access to documents from an IBM Content Manager repository via a Web browser. IBM WEBi makes it easier for more users to access, use, combine, and reuse content to solve business challenges and improve workforce effectiveness."

Open Text Corporation

Open Text offers LiveLink ECM, an integrated content lifecycle management (CLM) bundle which includes document management, workflow, records management, archiving, and some imaging capability.

Open Text released the latest version of its CLM bundle in March of 2008. The next generation of Open Text’s collaboration model launched in June. "This is Open Text’s next step to help our customers get ready for the onslaught of what Web 2.0 could be," says McKinnon.

To expand collaboration capabilities, McKinnon says the company is expanding its offerings. "We’re introducing some real-time components so organizations can take a look, for example, at a piece of content. If I see that my manager or assistant is online and we need to work on the same document quickly for a deadline, we can move into a spontaneous screen sharing discussion mode right on that document, get that work done, and view each other’s edits. We’re moving into real-time, spontaneous collaboration around key documents and key content."

OIT

Thumma says that OIT’s goal is to keep customers in the functional environment they are used to. "We don’t give them the whole folder if they just need one page," explains Thumma. "We extend information in unstructured documents and get it out to people where they can use it and be more functional—not make them experts in finding documents."

Thumma notes that OIT’s DocFinity system is underwritten in Web services. In addition, he highlights the robustness of the workflow and the ability to handle high volume and complex projects. "We’re doing things other people are only talking about or dreaming about," he adds.

At the end of this year, OIT will launch an upgrade for DocFinity customers, the new product will feature an advanced Java EE (J2EE) background, complete Flash interface, and other exciting enhancements.

Xerox

Xerox DocuShare is a Web-based ECM solution designed to increase employee productivity and allow for secure, enterprise-wide information control without increasing demands on IT. DocuShare is comprised of both DocuShare 6.0 for basic content services and DocuShare CPX 6.0 for advanced content and process management.

DocuShare recently announced its DocuShare Express, a new product geared to the SMB market to address the cost and technology barriers previously associated with ECM solutions.

In addition, Xerox provides its DocuShare customers with a connector to the Xerox Extensible Interface Platform (EIP), making it easier to digitize and store documents directly to DocuShare from a Xerox multifunction device panel.

Xythos

Xythos recently upgraded to the new version 7.0 of its flagship Enterprise Document Management Suite (EDMS). The upgrade incorporates several of the latest Web 2.0 features, such as support for integrated wikis and RSS feeds to enhance collaboration and real-time notification.

James Till, CMO, Xythos Software, notes that the company, "also delivered a completely new Web user interface utilizing Ajax technology, which delivers desktop-like responsiveness and easy user customization within any browser environment."

Xythos recently added enhanced workflow and document classification features to Xythos on Demand, a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering, which also benefits from the same enhancements in the EDMS version 7.0.

The Time is Now
ECM allows organizations to capture, manage, store, preserve, deliver, and collaborate on content with success.

"CM is really about helping people aggregate the information that helps them make good business decisions and about automating the process that routes that information to the appropriate people and the appropriate steps to an ultimate decision," states Tidmarsh.

Companies of all sectors and sizes are rewarded by ECM. We’ve shared highlights of new options on the market and a few innovative success stories.

If your organization has yet to reign in its disparate documents and content, now is the time. Soon, ECM will be the among the ranks of the cell phone and computer—the technology you often take for granted, but is necessary for staying organized with the added benefits of collaboration, security, and efficiency.