General purpose ECM and DM systems may lack the functionality and process flexibility needed to deal with case management, and integration with a CRM system may be needed to handle the communications aspects. However, recent developments have introduced the concept of dynamic or adaptive case management within ECM systems, able to manage the case-process workflow in a flexible way, and able to link with multiple customer communications channels.  
 
In this report, we survey how well the IT infrastructure currently used by customer-centric, process-driven suppliers matches the demands of case management, and look at their planned strategies for the future

ERP has long reigned supreme as the all-encompassing enterprise application, and is primarily focused on structured content. ECM, meanwhile has grown rapidly to become the repository of all the unstructured content and documents that accumulate outside of the purely transactional processes. Joining up these two major business engines has major potential as a common information interface for users across the business.

In this report we discuss the benefits and practicalities of integrating ERP with content and document management systems, what the most popular choices are for portal configurations and integration middleware, and what longer term issues might arise for support and compatibility.

Business prcesses, particularly those within Sharpoint, can come to a sudden halt if process documents need to be printed out just to collect signatures. Today’s digital signature systems, with well designed user and certificate management, can be readily extended across the enterprise, and indeed to the extended enterprise of customers and partners.

Based on our survey data, we look at the regulatory requirement for signature approvals across different industry sectors, the drivers and issues for selecting a solution, the barriers to adoption, and the business benefits reported by existing users.

Records management has gained increasing prominence over the past few years. From high-profile court cases, to new legislation and regulations, it has been dragged blinking from the archive basement where it traditionally resided into the blinding spotlight of center stage. Electronic records management systems have also matured, gaining in functionality and depth, and with adoption moving from government and regulated industries to all types of organizations, across all sectors. Yet even with this new high profile, it is not at all clear who is responsible for the management and preservation of the corporate memory or for the increasingly sophisticated mechanisms now available for managing records.

To manage any form of content, you first have to capture it. Capture by itself will not produce any cost savings. The savings come from the process benefits and opportunities that flow once a document is freed from its physical form. It can then be data-extracted, indexed, viewed, moved, replicated, workflowed, stored and preserved electronically. In this survey by AIIM, we found that investments in document scanning and capture, when taken as part of a specific process improvement, can produce considerable cost savings in relatively short timescales – frequently paying back the initial investment in less than 12 months.

The trick to overcoming management's objections is to identify what’s causing them the most operational pain, and then to explain how information management technology can alleviate that pain and make them managerial heroes at the same time.

Check out the excuses that executives love to make to avoid cleaning up their digital landfill.

Microsoft SharePoint has captured the ECM market’s attention. While some may argue that SharePoint is not a panacea and is perhaps being over-used, many organizations around the world are reportedly using it for one or more ECM-related projects.

This industry research report looks at whether SharePoint can be successfully deployed enterprise-wide, if it's best suited for particular applications, if it's capable of addressing all of an enterprise’s content management needs, and does it have particular functional strengths and weaknesses?

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is often discussed as if it were a single entity. In reality, ECM is a family of many technologies, which, if properly orchestrated, leverage the features of each component to bring about a powerful level of interaction between people and the business content and processes they use. Looked at in this way, ECM can be considered to encompass business strategy as much as it does information technology (IT) strategy. ECM systems offer a myriad of benefits. ECM can cross virtually every corporate application and every IT platform, on desktops, intranets, and so on, and thus affect virtually every user.

Where there are organizations with competing interests, there is sure to be litigation.  A party involved in litigation has a duty to preserve information that may be relevant to that litigation. In the past, this duty resulted mainly in storage of paper records. Today, however, the use of computers has created many more kinds of records — electronic records — that organizations are obligated to store. As quantities of electronic data have grown, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) have been amended to regulate the storage of such data as it might apply to litigation.