* Practical advice on selecting ECM and CMS products
In the last couple of issues of the Network World Web Applications Newsletter we’ve been looking at content management systems. CMSs tend to focus on Web content, which is arguably a limited case of enterprise content management, itself a rather nebulous concept.
ECM is defined by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) as: “the technologies 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.”
When I wrote “nebulous” I wasn’t being sarcastic. The distinction between ECM products and CMSs lies mainly in two areas. First is ECM’s focus on integrated content capture from a broader range of sources than CMS products are usually designed to do. Second, ECM products are intended to provide a broader range of content distribution methods than CMS systems usually provide (these are typically restricted to Web services).
While that distinction sounds important, products identified as CMSs aren’t really limited by their ability to capture content and are moving decidedly towards a more modern range of delivery options (for example, RSS and Web services) than products classified as ECM products appear to address.
The reality is that many ECM products claim a broad range of functionality that only the most optimistic would believe as being “best of breed,” while CMSs tend to focus on the core issue of content management.
My practical advice is that if you are looking at content management software, forget about labels such as CMS or ECM and focus on features and functionality. Whatever you buy will wind up being part of your organization’s IT evolution – and it will either track and meet your changing business process requirements or it won’t. The more complex a selected product is, the more likely that your business and market trends will make that product obsolete, and that will have a profound cost in both time and money.
I believe, and feedback from readers supports this belief, that integrating a collection of carefully chosen subsystems to achieve large-scale business functionality makes far more tactical and strategic sense than putting all of your IT eggs in one vendor’s “we-do-everything” basket.
This rationale has been proved to be valid time and time again in the worlds of CRM and ERP, and CMS/ECM is no different. Web applications are now mainstream IT; they aren’t an unknown quantity or experimental. Choose the product that makes sense in terms of scale and in terms of how you operate – or pay the consequences.
