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TopEnterprise Content Management
Concept of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has emerged during the last 20 years and is still evolving (see one of the most cited definitions in Blair, 2004). The term nowadays is much wider in scope than its origins. We will follow the more recent and comprehensive definition of Grahlmann, Lehnard and Slatter (2011, p. 5):
Enterprise content management comprises the strategies, processes, methods, systems, and technologies that are necessary for capturing, creating, managing, using, publishing, storing, preserving, and disposing content within and between organizations.
The most important enhancement of the latter is acknowledging the significance of the communication between the organizations. This is the important area for improvements because a lot of information that should be shared is duplicated between enterprises. It is an illusion that a correspondence saved in repositories of two organizations is safer in comparison with one copy in a decently protected shared storage. The shared solution has obvious advantages though – allowing for search in context of two enterprises (if the searcher has necessary authority).
ECM should be regarded as integrative middleware that uses internet technologies for in-house information provision (Kampffmeyer, 2007). It covers a wide area of functionality (Bantin, 2008; Nilsen, 2012; Korb & Strodl, 2010; Kampffmeyer, 2007) that surrounds five functional areas - Document Management, Collaboration of supporting systems (or group-ware), Web Content Management (this includes portals), Records Management (archive and file management systems) and Workflow and Business Process Management.