We all know there are many Content and Asset Management systems out there, and many times they have similar features. But how do you decide who is the best for your company? The answer is to use a scenario based approach. Knowing what you want and need out of a solution will help immensely.

Over at IntelligentEnterprise, Tony Byrne has written an article detailing this scenario based approach:

The lines between all content technology families are notoriously blurry. This is especially true of portals, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems and Web Content Management (WCM) system, where there’s lots of overlap in vendors, product functionality, and marketing messages. For example, if you’re looking to implement Intranet-based document management, you could conceivably use any of these three types of products. Yet some consultancies will try to sell you all three types of solutions, with an obligatory (and expensive) integration project.

Take a scenario-based approach that solves your most pressing needs first. ECM, WCM and portals fill fairly specific roles and tend to address different problems. By understanding what you’re trying to accomplish, you can better identify the technologies you do and don’t need

……And what exactly, you might ask, is the difference among “Global Intranet” (WCM), “Enterprise Intranet” (Portal) or “Enterprise Web Publishing” (ECM)? Quite possibly very little. On the other hand, you should know that the tools approach the problem in different ways. The WCM solution will likely emphasize semi-structured content and documents with employee-friendly editorial interfaces. The intranet portal will bring a functional focus to interactive applications (such as a people-finder portlet). The ECM product will likely provide native hooks from the intranet into its own document and records management repositories. Ironically, CMS Watch research suggests that “enterprise-tier” vendors do a comparatively poor job at the kind of multi-Web-site management scenarios you see in large enterprises.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 12:50 pm and is filed under General, Tech Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.