ECM FAQ

This short Questions and Answers series is intended to be a starting point for any person, interested in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions.

1. What is the meaning of term “Enterprise Content Management”?

Simple informal definition may be the following:

ECM is the methodology, set of technologies, organizational policies and procedures for managing unstructured content along the enterprise.

Managing usually include following operations, features and benefits:

• content metadata unification,
• content grouping and classification,
• single security model and rights management,
• full text search,
• workflows,
• capture (scanning, recognition, verification),
• integration, content consumption and delivery fromto other IT systems,
• audit and logging,
• centralized backup, retention and life circle policies

ECM is focused on unstructured content, for example:

• office files,
• web pages and sites,
• books and articles,
• invoices, bills and forms,
• letters and correspondence (in text or scanned versions)
• images, photographs,
• multimedia files,
• CAD/CAM,
• general purpose archives, binary and any text files

ECM is not only a set of software tools, provided by ECM software vendors, but it is also an organizational strategy that requires careful and comprehensive design, requirements analysis, rules, guides and policies preparation, and integration with existing corporate information systems.

Further reading:

• Wikipedia: Enterprise Content Management
• AIIM: What is ECM?

2. What are the main components of a ECM system?

Complete ECM software offering usually includes following components:

• Document management
• Web sites content management
• Digital assets (imaging and multimedia) management
• Records management
• Full text search engine
• Workflow engine
• Business process integration services
• Document conversion engine
• Scanning and recognition engine and services

Further reading:

• Wikipedia: Components of an enterprise content management system

3. What are the major ECM software vendors?

First let’s make some market segmentation. There are few market leaders that offer full ECM suite software solutions and support, including nearly all ECM components under one brand name. It’s not only about including 150 software packages under one name, but most importantly about providing of all those into one easy to deploy, use and maintain suite with seamless and transparent integration between the parts.

Then, there are less monstrous players, that use to call their products ECM also, but provide only several ECM features that usually group under one major ECM component like Document management or Web content management. They used to grow rapidly in recent years and some of them can really provide most of ECM features for now.

And finally there are niche players that offer only one or two features of ECM, but nevertheless dare to call it ECM. Let it be on their conscience.

So, let us see who’s who:

ECM Suite Vendors (in alphabetical order):

• Documentum (EMC) – Documentum
• IBM – FileNet P8 Platform
• Open Text – LiveLink ECM Suite
• Oracle – Enterprise Content Management Suite

Smaller, more one major component centric, but also feature-rich and enterprise level ready ( (in alphabetical order):

• Alfresco – Alfresco ECM
• Hyland Software, Inc. – OnBase
• Interwoven – ECM Solutions
• Microsoft – Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
• Vignette – ECM Suite
• Xerox – DocuShare

This list shows only few most interesting companies that have proven their ambitions to provide corporate ECM solutions and appear in leader sections of Gartner and Forrester ratings for 2007-2008 ECM Suites reviews (see links below).

Further reading:

• Wikipedia: ECM market development
• CMS Watch ECM Suites Vendor List
• Gartner: Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management 2008
• The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Content Management Suites, Q4 2007

4. Do I need a contractor or vendor partnering company to implement ECM?

Depends on what scope of ECM features are required. In most cases external consultancy will help perspective customer to formalize and understand what do they really require from ECM, how long would it really take to implement and for how much. Then it will be up to client to decide.

But anyway it is always needed to realize one simple postulate: implementing ECM in the enterprise is not actually a matter of installing and configuring software. It is a serious implementation project that will step from requirements management and business process reengineering and analysis, through writing functional and technical specifications, architecture and integration requirements to final steps if software installation, configuration, customization, integration with other IT systems, testing and writing end-user docs.There is even more stuff to be performed, but let’s keep it in general for now.

5. Why should I pay tons of money for full ECM solution if there are open source alternatives?

In most cases what is called “open source ECM” is just a basic core content server engine with limited pack of features that can be freely downloaded and installed. It is shipped without warranty or certification, simple documentation and only community support in forums and wikis. In comparison to this basic free offering there always is a full featured but licensed solution that is based on the same content server engine but adds numerous improvements to user interface, scalability, integration and support. This is the business model of most popular open source ECM vendors like Alfresco and KnowledgeTree. Again, if you will require full featured ECM, it will cost money. But if you only need basic document or web content management, these solutions would help nearly for free.

With very few followers (most prominent is Nuxeo) there is another business model to develop fully functional single ECM offering (but with limited documentation and community support) and sell full support and consulting for money.

In general, ECM software license fees share the total price of implementation project with consulting and support services that usually are more expensive than software, that is why it is important to valuate the whole project, not just licensing. Also take into consideration that ECM Suite vendors offer extensive community and helpdesk support to customers, they educate, support, test and certify their partners and consultancy companies that offer implementation services. And don’t forget about discounts that are usually offered by vendor partners with big implementations.