The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Putting your finger on what Content Management is
There’s been a number of articles and blogs over the last week that show that the definition of ‘Content Management’ has become blurred and is continuing to change. Jim Rapoza at eWeek says that things like collaboration, portals and wikis are ouside the definition of traditional Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Jim thinks that vendors are labeling their products as ECM systems when their functionality is actually much more limited. He asks, for example, whether a vendor could call a collaborative portal product that adds “document collection management” an ECM product. Good question.
Vern Imrich on Gilbane’s Content Technology CTO blog sees a bifurcation of the definition of Content Management products. Vendors like Oracle and Microsoft are creeping into the content management realm by gradually incorporating CM type functionality at the infrastructure level — with Oracle’s Content DB coming at it from the database and Microsoft coming at it from the file system. At the other extreme are vertical applications that are extending their feature space into areas traditionally considered as content management. Content Management can play a part of both infrastructure and high-level applications.
In another article, John Newton sees the Web2.0 influences on today’s content management applications and has dubbed the new breed of application ‘Content Management 2.0’. He sees content management as being changed by collaborative web capabilities like blogs, wikis and syndication.
Defining exactly what Content Management (or Enterprise Content Management) is and what feature set it includes is something that never has been clear. AIIM has had their share of interesting art and posters that try to draw relationships between the pieces. The ECM space is huge. Core ECM consists of capabilities like scan/capture, imaging, document management, and workflow/BPM. Other important capabilities include Web Content Management, Records Management and Digital Asset Management. Very few vendors can claim solutions in all categories of the ECM space.
At Formtek we recognize Collaboration as central to ECM solutions and we have a diagram called the Formtek Enterprise Collaboration Mosaic that shows key pieces of ECM at a high level.
