Enterprise Content Management

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a formalized means of organizing and storing an organization's documents, and other content, that relate to the organization's processes. The term encompasses strategies, methods, and tools used throughout the lifecycle of the content.... Enterprise content management, as a form of content management, combines the capture, search and networking of documents with digital archiving, document management and workflow. It specifically includes the special challenges involved in using and preserving a company's internal, often unstructured information, in all of its forms. Therefore, most ECM solutions focus on business-to-employee (B2E) systems. The technologies that comprise ECM today are the descendants of late 1980s and early 1990s electronic document management systems (EDMS). The original EDMS products were stand-alone products, providing functionality in one of four areas: imaging, workflow, document management, or ERM (see components below).