Enabling Enterprise Content Management with Confidence

Many organizations worldwide have their C-level executives sitting in the boardroom, hemming and hawing over which strategies they must adopt in order to maintain a competitive advantage. There are plenty of business needs scattered throughout the enterprise—improving business processes, fostering collaboration among knowledge workers, providing access to all company-wide information, making better business decisions faster... the list can go on in perpetuity.

Today's successful businesses must be truly connected, innovation-driven and hyper-competitive in order to survive. Enterprise social, when implemented properly, offers efficiency in the flow of information and could significantly shorten decision-making processes and thus increase competitiveness and innovation. However, the ease of access to information and controlling the risk to leakage of enterprise intelligence are inherently opposing forces. Today's enterprise collaboration systems, whether on-premises or cloud-based, along with rich mobile access features encourage free thinking and creativity. However, enterprise collaboration without robust, verifiable information governance and compliance features is a recipe for disaster.

There must be one initiative that can help tie these disparate needs together, all while improving business practices and demonstrating a tangible return on investment. That promise can be achieved with enterprise content management (ECM).

First, what is ECM? It may be easier to look at the ultimate goal: seamlessly connecting a company's business processes, knowledge workers and organization-wide information. ECM constitutes a fully integrated platform and architectural framework that brings about total collaboration, intelligent content lifecycle management and greater productivity.

ECM is meant to cater to specific business requirements, not the other way around. With that said, there are several key objectives that nonetheless must be met in order to make the triad of line-of-business users, IT and compliance stakeholders happy:

• Establish control over the ever-growing volume of records and documents to mitigate task duplication and minimize time spent searching for information;
• Streamline processes and improve content ownership information in order to create more relevant data, which subsequently enables content to be more discoverable and not only enable collaboration but also enhance it; and
• Flexibly meet evolving regulatory compliance obligations, including document retention policies, unstructured information management and records management, to ensure that information is accessible to those who should have access to it and protected from those who should not.

And the stakes have never been greater. Gartner Research posits that by 2016, 20% of CIOs will lose their jobs for failing to implement disciplined information governance to corral the rampant content proliferation throughout organizations today. While these are all viable objectives seemingly any business should meet, is there a technological platform available that can meet these demands?

SharePoint as a Foundation for Successful ECM

In order to streamline collaboration and improve productivity, organizations are always looking to the next popular trend—and today, that's social collaboration. In order to meet these challenges, we see organizations adopting a strategy of social collaboration in order to decrease communication lags among knowledge workers and readily surface information that may be valuable to colleagues.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 attempted to emphasize the concept of combining traditional ECM capabilities with newer social features in one singular platform, and this idea of enterprise social was one the megavendor replicated throughout many of its 2010 Microsoft Office and SharePoint products. With the latest release, Microsoft SharePoint 2013, the enterprise collaboration landscape has evolved vastly, and so has the idea of enterprise social. Now a part of seemingly every executive's lexicon, the message is simple: collaboration and usability. Microsoft is making a great effort to clean up its software's interfaces and enable better usability across all of its products.

SharePoint 2013 takes a monumental step forward in terms of document management through the drag-and-drop functionality of SharePoint document libraries. Uploading documents in previous versions of SharePoint has always meant a lot of clicking and a huge change from using the fileshare, where users just drag and drop content from their local machines. The other option for getting documents into SharePoint 2010 quickly was utilizing SharePoint Workspace, but that often was unpredictable and had document library scalability limitations. In SharePoint 2013, SkyDrive Pro is a new attempt at taking your content offline and replaces SharePoint Workspace. The experience of taking your documents offline has also been improved by simply clicking the sync button.

Microsoft is also making it easier to find documents and email together in SharePoint with unified views on team sites. SharePoint 2013 introduces a new concept of "Share" that really takes the effort out of security management for business users by simply nominating the user or group and what permissions you would like them to have with two clicks.

In terms of social features in SharePoint 2013, the newsfeeds are much more impactful for understanding how your colleagues are working with content in which you're interested. The enterprise social features are much easier to use and they resemble the big social networks, as you can follow just about anything in SharePoint and even use mentions and hashtags, similar to Twitter and Facebook.

Moving on from the line-of-business collaboration side of the house, ensuring governance and compliance—the sheer security—of your rapid content creation is a topic that keeps many a CIO and chief risk officer awake at night. When looking back at SharePoint 2010, the major addition was certainly the managed metadata service which allowed for the tagging of content with a taxonomy or folksonomy of terms. This greatly improved the discovery of content through searching and refining by terms. Although the user interface for managed metadata hasn't changed since SharePoint 2010, there are a number of improvements—such as being able to follow terms from a social perspective. The other addition is the ability to have properties associated with terms, which has been introduced to have navigation driven by term sets.

In another attempt to improve governance and oversight of SharePoint as a social enterprise collaboration platform, site policies now trigger workflows that you can build and have various configurations for handling inactive sites. Site policies were also available in SharePoint 2010 by accessing via the central admin user interface. The site policies allowed you to send email notifications to business users if their sites were not accessed for a set period of time. This really helps business users who are accountable for sites and need to clean them up over time. In the past, this was really a nagging type of email, and there was no real visibility into which sites were out of policy.