Over the last several years, organizations have created a huge volume of unstructured content that includes documents, e-mail, videos, instant messages, Web pages, and more. This content often exists in a state of unmanaged chaos, which can prevent your organization from properly using these valuable assets for better knowledge sharing, improved customer communications, and increased process efficiency.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) from Microsoft can provide your organization with the capability to help protect and manage these vast reserves of content, so they can be used as strategic assets to drive overall business growth.

To successfully manage this explosion of unmanaged content, an organization must be able to:

Protect and reuse information. In most organizations, content is stored in multiple locations (such as local computer drives and file shares) without a consistent taxonomy to identify its nature. This makes it hard for users to find and reuse content that they need for their day-to-day jobs. The result is much time wasted in searching for and re-creating information. It also promotes less-efficient practices, such as using e-mail as a document collaboration tool. Without a centralized way to control “content chaos,” central IT groups have difficulty protecting information assets and sensitive documents from unauthorized access.

Comply with regulatory and legal requirements. Because of various compliance regulations and legal risks, organizations need strict retention policies for keeping records, like business transaction documents, for a certain period of time. Failure to do so can result in fines, imprisonment, or the expense of millions of dollars in legal proceedings.

Manage multiple publishing channels. Organizations that see the value of content as a strategic business asset look for ways to realize value by publishing this content through intranets, extranets, and the Internet for employees, partners, and customers. However, managing the authoring, approval, publishing, and deployment of Web content across all these different sites is an enormous burden on the IT organization. One webmaster alone often cannot handle the workload, but distributing this task creates the challenge of maintaining a consistent look and feel and preserving brand assets, particularly for external-facing sites.

Automate inefficient processes. Many organizations manually process paper content. Claims processing or loan origination, for example, can involve passing numerous paper applications and forms from one individual to another. Manual processing of paper is inherently slow and organizations can lose business and customers because of a perceived lack of responsiveness. Organizations that try to automate these processes using basic tools such as e-mail often find it difficult to do in a manner that truly brings about improvements and efficiency gains.

A Microsoft ECM solution can help your company overcome these challenges. Built on a well-integrated platform, ECM easily extends content management to every information worker in an organization through integration with familiar tools like the Microsoft Office system. A Microsoft ECM solution can help businesses:

Manage diverse content. Your people can use the document management capabilities in the Microsoft integrated ECM solution to consolidate diverse content from multiple file shares and personal drives into a centrally managed repository with consistent categorization. Integrated search capabilities can help them find and share this information. IT organizations can also protect the content in this centrally managed repository from unauthorized access. Integrated collaboration capabilities, such as automated workflow, help people work better together to create, review, and approve documents in a more structured way—they no longer have to rely solely on e-mail to share documents. Mobile workers can also use these documents offline when they are not connected to the network.

Satisfy compliance and legal requirements. The Microsoft ECM solution also includes integrated records management capabilities that give organizations the capability to store and protect business records in their final state. Expiration policies applied to these records help ensure that the records are retained for the appropriate time period to comply with regulations or corporate business polices, thereby mitigating legal risk to the organization. Audit trails provide proof to internal and external auditors that records have been retained appropriately. Holds can be placed on specific records under legal discovery to prevent their destruction.

Efficiently manage multiple Web sites. Integrated Web content management capabilities can help your people publish Web content with an easy-to-use content authoring tool and a built-in approval process. This helps ensure that content is uploaded to Web sites in a timely manner without placing a large burden on IT staff. Templates for Master Pages and Page Layouts enable consistent branding to be applied to all pages, thereby helping to ensure that brand assets are properly used. A single deployment and management infrastructure for intranet, extranet, and Internet sites—as well as for multilingual sites—reduces the cost and complexity for IT departments.

Streamline business processes. The Microsoft ECM solution helps businesses to streamline content-driven, collaborative business processes by providing the tools and platform for automating them. Electronic forms solutions provide a mechanism for gathering and validating input for these business processes across Web sites, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office system programs. Forms can be created once, and management tools help your IT team to easily deploy and track the use of these forms across multiple channels.

Microsoft provides these capabilities on a single integrated business productivity infrastructure. This significantly reduces the management burden on the IT organization because they now have a common set of tools and methodologies for managing the solution. Tight integration with familiar tools, such as Microsoft Office system programs, helps the Microsoft ECM solution to easily extend these capabilities to every information worker in the organization. This reduces the burden on users, who no longer need to learn new tools or change the way they work in order to participate in their organization’s content management strategy.

The Microsoft ECM solution helps organizations protect and manage content so that they can unlock the value of this important business asset. The ECM solution can help your people:

• Quickly find and reuse the information they need.
• Protect sensitive business information from unauthorized use.
• Facilitate structured and collaborative creation of documents.
• Better comply with government regulations.
• Reduce legal risk caused by improperly retained content.
• Hold records required during legal discovery.
• Quickly author and publish content.
• Maintain branding across all Web sites.
• Reduce the cost of managing multiple sites in multiple languages.
• Gain process efficiency by automating manual tasks.
• Gather and validate business-process input data from multiple channels with a single form.
• Rapidly develop, deploy, and manage electronic forms solutions.