Once upon a time, organisations used to maintain a warehouse to maintain and store piles and piles of files, documents and images they had for their internal records. These documents used to be stored in paper. But gone are the days and gone are the older ways of keeping records. But for today’s generation, everything is on the finger tips. We are being accustomed to store all this data on computers and file work has become a highly tedious task for us.

There was a time when everything was on paper. With digitalization of business, the focus has shifted from paper to computers right from the work being carried out online to payments being done online and to recruiting people online.

For all these jobs, the data needs to be stored on the computer and then transferred to paper. There are faxes, emails, invoices, shipping, purchase orders sent every day. All these when done without the internet will only result in heavy usage of paper and will add up a lot of cost on the part of the company. Enterprise content Management helps the companies to do all this digitally, with reduced cost and optimized resource utilization. This process which refers to the organizing and storing of all the documents and other various contents which are associated with the processes involving the organization is known as Enterprise Content Management. The content management is inclusive of the strategies, methods and tools which are used throughout the content’s lifecycle.

Going by the definition, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) comprise of the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM covers the management of information within the entire scope of an enterprise whether that information is in the form of a paper document, an electronic file, a database print stream, or even an email.

Enterprise Content management also encompasses all the fields like document management, Web content management, search, collaboration, records management, digital asset management, work flow management, capture and scanning.

There are basically three basic ideas which can distil the solutions offered by the Enterprise Content management and Web Content Management:

• Enterprise content management as integrative middleware
• Enterprise content management as independent services
• Enterprise content management as uniform repository for all types of information

It is normally seen that the enterprise content management is one of the basic needs of a company which wants to have a successful e business applications. Enterprise content management helps handling, delivering and managing both structured and unstructured data. The various components which the Enterprise Content Management is made up of can also work on stand-alone platforms and not necessarily be embedded into enterprises.

There are five components of Enterprise Content Management namely capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver.

Data being a critical need of organisation, preserving it becomes all the more important. To cater to these needs, many companies are providing the Enterprise Content Management solutions to these organisations. With technology at hand, content management has become simple and less cumbersome.