Enterprise Content Management The Smart Way to Manage Your Business Documents

Transcription

1 Enterprise Content Management The Smart Way to Manage Your Business Documents An ebook by SoftProdigy

2 Table of Contents Introduction. 3 What is Enterprise Content Management (ECM)??. 4 Content Management Systems used as ECM Platforms:. 5 Liferay. 9 SharePoint. 12 Conclusion 13

3 Introduction Businesses today, speak the same language as before but there are a whole lot of words added to their vocabulary. We are still e gaged i u i g a d selli g ut that has ajorl take a ele tro i for. We re still i to arketi g stuff ut ost of that is shifted o the digital fro t. We re still spreadi g the ord a out produ ts a d ser i es ut that s do e through the tre di g o te t pra ti es. The spheres of everything involved in a business have expanded more towards the internet. And to ask why would be a total waste of an effort. We all are well aware about how helplessly engrossed we stay on the internet, day in and day out. We re usto ers, right? The usi esses ill rea h us here the a easil fi d us! A d that s h i ter et is a thi g for the new business world. Not only to reach the outside world, internet has become a thing for business organizations even to facilitate their inside work. Just as before, things are not fun and games in the business world. Even though everything is at the fi gertips of toda s usi ess e, the still ha e to ork their fi gers to the o e, to get the world know them. To get the most out of your business efforts and to make quicker decisions, you not only need to create the right content but you also need to manage it well! Now, for businesses, so many content pieces are created on a regular basis. When it comes to marketing, content is to be created for different marketing channels, be it blogs, social media, s, or something else. However, when it comes to the internal working of a business, a number of other documents need to be created and saved. To get the right content at the right time, the flow of documents and their management needs to be in an efficient control within an organization. So, ho are ou a d our staff goi g to a age all of our usi ess s o te t? I the a se e of the right document management, the data can get lost in the transit or can get messed up. And to avoid situations like this, the Enterprise Content Management system comes to the rescue!

4 What is Enterprise Content Management (ECM)? An Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system is a solution for a business organization for an effective management of documents and content. An efficient ECM system allows the business organizations to keep document management handy by saving a lot of their time and money. An ideal ECM uses a robust set of tools and back-end technology to define and share the structured information, data, and content to different teams and departments. With the help of ECM, any organization can digitize its documents for a perfect workflow and can systematize the process of transferring the documents. Thus, the right person can easily have an access to the right data or content at the right time. With such a systematic organization and pooling of content, the organizations can manage data and designate it to the concerned users like business executives, employees, customers, etc. All in all, an Enterprise Content Management System is a combination of tools, techniques, methodology, and strategies that help organizations to capture, store, and transfer the content with a great effectiveness.

5 Important Attributes Elements of an ECM Content Capture Content capture or document capture is generally the process of converting an objective document to some other format, often used for digital representation. With the help of an Enterprise Content Management system or software, the structured as well as unstructured data can be easily captured. The data or content is captured in the form of word documents, presentations, spreadsheets, graphic images, drawings, videos, audio files, etc. The data once captured, is then imported and stored as a collection of data called the digital content repository. An ECM enables content capture by a number of ways like Enabling the creation of documents in digital formats using electronic forms Capturing the documents already present in digital formats like Audio-Video files, Images, PDF files, MS Office Documents, etc. Saving the scanned copies of physical or paper documents Creating A Digital Repository For Documents All the documents that are vital from the business point of view can be efficiently stored using an ECM. An Enterprise Content Management system allows organizations to store the documents safely and securely in one place called the digital depository. Thus, the organizations can easily manage the business-specific documents saving a great deal of time and cost generally involved in physical or manual management of the data. The digital depository stores the documents and content in such a way that the designated user can easily access the document and make the required changes. The users can also organize various documents by utilizing the adaptable folders.

6 An ebook on ECM

7 Easy Retrieval Of Documents After ou e got a effi ie t ECM for our orga izatio, ou eed ot spe d a lot of our time in finding and locating the right document at the right time. With easy search options, the ECM system makes it easy for the users to find the documents and access them whenever required. Thus, the staff can make better and timely decisions with a quick access to the required information through the easy retrieval feature. Digital Automation Of Documents With everything becoming hi-tech in the world of business, wasting time in unnecessary manual efforts for document management is not a good idea. Thus, digital automation of documents came into being through the ECM. With the help of this feature, the documents can be routed to the concerned person in an automated manner and any errors present within the documents are recognized in advance. Also, with the help of digital automation, the ECMs notify the users whenever any document needs to be taken care of. Ensuring High Security of Data The flow of different documents within an organization might pose a great risk to the privacy of sensitive data. But that is not the case with ECM systems. The ECM system protects the documents and data through a restricted access for users. The content is saved in the form of files, folders, fields, etc. that require special access permissions through user credentials. Only after getting the access permissions can a user make edits, create a document, or delete it. Thus, the content stays under a great security. With all these elements, an ECM can save the day by cutting all the chaos of document management prevailing in an organization. There are a number of Content Management Systems that can be used for building a fu tio al ECM s ste for a orga izatio. Let s e plore the!

8 Content Management Systems used as ECM Platforms Microsoft Silverlight is known to be a web development and web application framework. The tool has been used for the development of a number of web applications and interfaces on the internet. If ou e ee up to digitizi g our usi ess for the i ter et, ou ust ha e pu lished content on your website. Be it some promotional content, informational blogs, or just the website content describing your services, web publishing is usually adopted by businesses to reach your audience. For managing the content on your website, the web developers often use various competent Content Management Systems. So what is a content management system or a CMS? A CMS is a web development framework that comes with some exclusive features to make the management of content easier. The traditional web development frameworks were built keeping the experts in mind and so, they often came with complex features and operations. However, with an increased demand and usage of web content, the need for a convenient way to manage the web content was recognized. Thus, CMSs came into being. With a CMS, a person with no technical know-how of the web development can also manage the content for his website or web application. A CMS comes with easy to use features with an interactive dashboard that can even be operated by the people with no web development background. One of the most popular examples of a CMS framework is WordPress. Now, there are a number of CMS frameworks that come with the features of an efficient ECM, and thus, a number of organizations choose these frameworks for the development of their ECM systems. Two of such CMSs that can efficiently be used as ECM platforms are Liferay and SharePoi t. Let s ha e a loser look at oth these CMSs a d their ECM features.

9 Liferay Liferay CMS, also known as Liferay portal is one of the most popular CMS being used for the creation of ECM systems. It is an open source framework that offers a combination of features for content management and web publishing. Liferay is most widely used for fuelling the intranets and extranets of an organization, making the content management within enterprises convenient, secure, and costeffective. Liferay ECM systems are usually rich in features and are compatible with different kinds of IT infrastructures. Here is a list of features offered by the ECM systems developed using Liferay: Unification of Documents and Multimedia Files With the Liferay ECM system, a document repository is created for unifying the documents and media files together. The document repository can be leveraged as a web depository with an easy and safe access to the users. The depository can be easily shared with the entire organization, a team or department, a group of people, or an individual. The users can conveniently store documents or content in the repository, secure them, add tags, and search for them. The repository can store documents and media files like word documents, spreadsheets, presentations, images, audio/video files, etc.

10 Exclusive Search Options If ou re usi g a ECM s ste, ha es are that our do u e t repositor is goi g to get bigger and bigger. There is a plethora of documents and files of content in an organization and saving them all in the repository can create quite a big pool of content. Now, looking for a particular document or media file among this crowd of documents seems next to impossible! Liferay ECM system brings a number of exclusive search options that make it easy for the users to look up for a file or document. Features like Multi-Tier Search, Faceted Search, etc. make it convenient for the users to look up for a file, regardless of its location. Easy-To-Use Document Creation and Editing Tools You need not use any external tools for the creation and editing of your documents because Liferay provides you with the easy-to-use document creation and text editing tools. The users can create documents on the cloud using the feature-rich text editors of Liferay. With exclusive text styling and spell check features, anyone can create content easily. If your content is to be edited on the web, say that of your website, the same can be done with Liferay ECM s li e te t editi g tools. Efficient Coordination Within The Organization A great amount of content is created within an organization on a regular basis. But, not every team member or individual is involved in creating the content. Some are there for assigning the work, some are there to review, some are there to approve while the others finalize and publish the work. All this requires the involvement of different people working in an organization. To manage a proper coordination of the content, the Liferay ECM system ensures a complete workflow engine. The workflow engine conveniently manages who assigns, reviews, and publishes the content and ensures another workflow for the approval of the said work before publishing.

11 Easy Conversion and Uploading Of Documents With Liferay ECM system, it is quite handy for the users to convert the documents to different file formats. This can be done by uploading a file or document in a certain format while making it available in several other formats too. So, the user can download the document in the required format. Also, while uploading the files, it is often frustrating if the user has to upload the documents one by one. Thankfully, that is not the case with Liferay ECM. With Liferay, you can upload multi documents in one go. These documents can be easily saved and you can also add tags on them, for an easy search in the future. With all these brilliant features and a promising convenience, Liferay can be the best CMS for your ECM system requirements. By using this CMS for your enterprise, you can rest assured that all your content, data, documents, or media files are safe at one place with an easy, safe, and secure access by the designated users.

12 SharePoint In the beginning, SharePoint was created by Microsoft as a web development framework for the creation of web portals using MS Office. However, as the utility, demand, and amount of content started boosting on the internet, Microsoft shifted its focus towards the management of content. And so, SharePoint emerged as a Content Management System, and gradually came up as one of the most competent ECM frameworks. With a number of features, Microsoft developed SharePoint as a suitable framework for ECM systems, enabling organizations to control their content, documents, and data in an efficient manner. With SharePoint ECM suite, the members of an organization can access the businesscritical information in a breeze. Not only an easy access control, but the ECM system by SharePoint also enables an efficient workflow, document management, collaborations, audit, versioning, indexing, and exclusive search options for the documents. Here is a list of features offered by the ECM systems developed using SharePoint:

13 Document IDs Talk about the convenience of accessing your documents. SharePoint has got your back! The SharePoint ECM system lets the users save the documents with unique document IDs. You can assign a unique document identifier for all the units of data and content placed in your repository. Thus, making it easy for you to locate the documents within your ECM system. Document Information Panel With the help of this feature, the user can easily browse the document information or metadata within the document. Not only this, you can also edit this document information as and when required. You can also create a set of terms or groups for the metadata so that the documents are distributed as per the groups and organized in a better way. This makes it handier for the users to locate the documents within a category. Efficient Document Management All the o te t or do u e ts pla ed o SharePoi t s ECM s ste a e a aged centrally. This means that the system creates a central document repository which holds all the uploaded documents that can be easily accessed by the designated users. The documents can be accessed anytime and from anywhere, by the users. The ECM system also comes with a great variety of tools to define the access permissions. Not everyone in an organization can have access to everything. To keep the data safe and secure, the organization can easily control access to the documents. CONCLUSION As a conclusion, it is evident that the ECM systems have emerged as an overgrowing demand for businesses. No matter what content, data, or documents the business has to manage, an adequate system for the workflow, storage, and management of the content must be there! Gone are the days when manual work was treated as the most efficient one. If you want to cut out the trouble and save your time, money, and efforts, going digital is a ust! E e if it s a out a agi g a d ir ulati g i for atio a d data u der just o e roof. To be efficient go digital and choose ECM for your business.