Forrester has release their report, The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Content Management Suites, Q4 2011, by Alan Weintraub with Stephen Powers and Anjali Yakkundi. It has the subtitle, EMC, IBM, OpenText, and Oracle Lead, with Microsoft Close Behind. The are doing this thorough enhanced ECM features in SharePoint. Forrester uses 66-criteria to evaluate enterprise content management (ECM) vendors. After those above came, Hyland Software, HP, Xerox, Allen Systems Group (ASG), and Alfresco.
The report notes that organizations are continuing to “grapple with an explosion of unstructured content.” There is also an expansion in the types of content: documents, scanned images, web content, rich media, email, corporate records, blogs, wikis, e-forms, audio, and video. They note that each content type brings its own editing and workflow requirements, and usually their own regulatory and compliance issues, making managing content increasingly complex and expensive. At the same time, information workers still want simple and easy-to-use content management tools.
This complexity means that for many organizations that cannot rely on a single platform even though that is the ideal. These organizations have are moving to a more content-centric approach with different solutions for specific types of content. Forrester now divides ECM products into four types: foundational, business, transactional, and persuasive.
The foundational ECM provides basic content management functionality including library services, basic workflow, search, and records management. The business ECM supports day-to-day workplace experience with compound document management, enterprise rights management, and team collaboration. Transactional ECM supports back-office processes with imaging, document output management, and business process management form the backbone of the transactional content technologies. Finally persuasive ECM supports content addressing external audience behavior through marketing, lead generation, and customer self-service. They note that examples of persuasive ECM include web content management, digital asset management, and document output for customer communications management. This all makes sense to me.
With this diverging field a number of role players are emerging that address specific niches. Add to this mix are open source, industry specific, and cloud solutions and the field is becoming more complex rather than narrowing. Then there is whole issue of making content sharing and content workflow more social. The report goes into great detail on each of the vendors.
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