Over the last several years, organizations have created a huge volume of unstructured content that includes documents, e-mail messages, videos, instant messages, Web pages, and more. This content often exists in a state of unmanaged chaos that prevents an organization from properly using these valuable assets for better knowledge sharing, improved customer communications, and increased process efficiency. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) from Microsoft is a key component of an organization's infrastructure, that can help companies overcome these challenges.

Built on a well-integrated platform, ECM from Microsoft 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

The document management capabilities in the Microsoft integrated ECM solution can help organizations consolidate diverse content from multiple file shares and personal drives into a centrally managed repository with consistent categorization. Integrated search capabilities can then help people 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. That 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 enable people to 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 in the form of 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 enables businesses to streamline content-driven, collaborative business processes by providing the tools and platform for automating the tasks of these processes. 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 allow IT to easily deploy and track the use of these forms across multiple channels.

These capabilities are provided by Microsoft on a single integrated business productivity infrastructure. This significantly reduces the management burden on the IT organization since 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 enables 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.

Workflow capabilities help reduce the barriers to user adoption. View a larger image.

Capabilities of ECM from Microsoft

The Microsoft ECM solution provides capabilities to manage the entire lifecycle of unstructured content from creation to expiration on a single unified platform. These capabilities include document management, records management, Web content management, and forms solutions.

Document management

•	Save time and easily reuse information. Organize and classify content within a centralized document repository to provide a consistent method for organizing, categorizing, navigating through, and quickly searching for the right information.
•	Help protect sensitive information. Help safeguard documents with integrated rights management that travels with documents wherever they may go. User access rights can be specified for individual items, and metadata can be removed from documents prior to final publication.
•	Streamline collaborative document creation. With built-in document workflows, you can initiate, track, and collaborate on document-oriented processes directly from within Microsoft Office system desktop programs. Important alerts and task information can be displayed in the document, helping to ensure that workflow steps are properly followed.

Records management

•	Improve legal and regulatory compliance. Apply information retention, protection, and auditing policies to business records to help ensure these records are appropriately retained.
•	Help secure business and vital records. A security-enhanced repository helps ensure that records are locked in the final state.
•	Easy litigation discovery. Help ensure that information required for legal discovery can be retrieved in a cost-effective manner and placed on hold as per the discovery requirements.

Records Repository for long term retention. View a larger image.

Web content management

•	Author and publish content quickly and easily. Business groups can author and publish Web content in a timely manner with easy-to-use authoring tools and integrated workflows with minimal IT involvement.
•	Maintain a consistent look and feel throughout your Web sites. Maintain consistency by providing approved master pages and page layouts that enable branding and navigation of the site to be specified once and reused by content authors.
•	Lower deployment and management costs your Web sites. Implement a single multi-tier infrastructure for publishing content to intranet, extranet, and Internet sites.

Forms solutions

•	Automate business processes. Automate many manual tasks by using Windows Workflow Foundation. Create new workflows with tools like Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007.
•	Gather information using electronic forms. Using Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007, businesses can create electronic forms which are then deployed to various channels including Web sites, mobile devices, and rich client applications.
•	Rapidly deploy and manage forms solutions. Quickly deploy forms solutions side-by-side upgrades to help ensure minimum downtime. View the status of all deployed forms in a single view. The following table outlines and compares the enterprise content management features included in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise CAL. For the complete feature outline, please refer to the Office SharePoint Server edition comparison document.

KEY:	= Features     = SharePoint Portal Server 2003     = Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise CAL

Feature Included	SharePoint Portal Server 2003	Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise CAL
Business document workflow support Automate document review, approval, signature collection, and issue tracking using workflow applications. • Approval • Collect feedback • Collect signatures • Disposition approval
Document management site templates • The Managed Document Library site template defines large-scale document management sites. • The Divisional Library site template includes managed document libraries, dashboards, key performance indicators (KPIs), and other reporting tools. • The Translation Library site template helps organizations manage multiple translations of a document.
Integration with Microsoft Information Rights Management (IRM) Helps ensure that access rights applied to Microsoft Office documents in a central library travel with the documents, even when they are downloaded from the library.
Document information panel Makes editing document properties an integral part of the Microsoft Office system document-authoring experience.
Document Action bar Describes to users what business policy or workflow governs the current document and what action they are expected to take.
Retention and auditing policies Define customized information management policies to control retention period, expiration actions, and document-auditing settings.
Records repository Helps ensure the integrity of the files stored in the repository, and supports information management policies that consistently and uniformly enforce auditing and expiration of records.
E-mail content as records Provides consistent, policy-based solutions for managing e-mail content across Office Outlook 2007, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Legal holds Makes it possible for records to be searched and placed on hold during litigation discovery to override the retention schedule of the records.
High fidelity Web sites with consistent branding Provides the concept of Master Pages and Page layouts to enforce the branding and navigation of Web sites. CSS supports gives pixel level control on the look and feel of these sites.
Navigation controls Out-of-the box navigation controls that can be easily customized by end users.
Content authoring Provides the ability for information workers to create content rich web pages using a Web browser.
Content publishing and deployment Built in approval workflow allows Web content to be sent for approval prior to publishing. Content deployment to production sites can be scheduled by setting up jobs and a "live" time period for each page can be specified within which that page is viewable.
Site templates Includes support for several new enterprise site templates: • The Enterprise Portal template provides a means for a business unit to create and share content that is relevant to the ongoing operation of an enterprise, division, or business unit. • The Corporate Internet Presence Site template includes tools and workflows to create and manage Web content for products and service descriptions, company news, and public filings, among other things. • The Application Portal template brings together all of the tools and information related to a particular line-of-business application. • The Roll-up Portal template consolidates data and content from several applications or locations and presents it in an integrated format.
Page Layouts Page Layouts simplify content authoring and publishing—site administrators define a structure that guides authors through the publishing process; content contributors focus on doing their jobs rather than on the details of publishing and deployment. Flexible Page Layouts also allow designers to mix and match ASP.NET applications, Web Parts, and Authoring Templates in any configuration to create customized sites to meet specific business needs.
Site variations A new feature of Office SharePoint Server 2007, sites can be linked together in a parent-child type of relationship providing a one-way orchestration framework for Web content. This feature allow organizations to deploy multi-lingual publishing sites in a much more structured and manageable environment.
WYSIWYG Web content editor Extends the SharePoint user interface with additional commands and status indicators for in-context Web page authoring.
Slide libraries The repository features in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provide the platform support for slide libraries, a feature of Office SharePoint Server 2007. Slide libraries enable the storage of individual slides in a SharePoint site. Office PowerPoint 2007 slide decks can be automatically created from a selection of slides in a slide library.
Policies, auditing, and compliance Repositories in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 support the following policy, auditing, and compliance features. However, the features denoted with an asterisk are activated only upon the installation of Office SharePoint Server 2007. • Document retention and expiration policies • Highly customizable policies • Workflow process to define expiration • Access control and security • IRM policies applied on download to secure the functional access to documents • Logging of all actions on sites, content, and workflows • Official document-of-record repositories • Site for storing or archiving enterprise approved content types