Management

Any system you procure will need to provide you with core management facilities including the ability to store the content files and the ability to link metadata to the files and use the metadata to search for and retrieve the files and control who has access to the files etc. The management systems provided by suppliers will vary based on whether their system is set up to manage simple documents only (EDM) or whether it can manage at the content and document level and support content re-purposing for multiple delivery media (CMS/WCM) and whether it also supports records management facilities.

The approach we take here is to review the electronic document and content management facilities together first and then go on to review specific electronic records management requirements. If you are looking at an ERM system only then you will also need many of the electronic document and content management facilities.

Electronic document and content management

Some Electronic Document Management systems only support a simple model inherited from document imaging of a document comprising one or more pages in the case of a scanned document or one file in the case of an electronic document.

All true content management systems should support simple and compound documents. Compound documents are documents that comprise multiple components. You would have a container document and then multiple content components. Components could comprise text files; graphic files; tables; images etc. You might need a different application to create and edit each component and then you needed to bring them together to create the master document. In sophisticated systems the container document is marked up and the other components tagged to the container.

Another feature of a content management system as opposed to some electronic document management systems is that the content management system manages at a lower level - it manages the objects or components or content that go to make up documents. The rationale is to help organisations exploit and reuse their content to create more documents. However, increasingly what most users need to do is manage at both levels - the content for editing and publishing and the document to support business processes and provide a record of transactions etc.

Another key differentiator is that a content management system is designed to keep the content separate from the delivery mechanism or the presentation format. With a document imaging or document management system you have no choice about how you view the document - you see an image of a page in an image viewer or you see the native text in a word processor etc.

With a content management system the content can be marked up using SGML or HTML or XML and then you define, using a style language, how you want that content to be rendered on one or many delivery devices. The delivery device can be a PC screen; a WAP phone screen; a PDA screen; a piece of paper etc. If you are in a publishing application you can optimise the presentation of your content for each delivery mechanism.

Hence a content management system treats content like data in a database. The content is held in a neutral format and marked up so it can be reused as an asset in a number of different ways. Some systems are actually called digital asset management systems.

At present the most popular delivery mechanism is via an internet or intranet or extranet web site and a user's browser. However true content management is designed to transcend any one delivery mechanism. Systems that are geared exclusively to the Internet are best referred to as Web Content Management Systems.

For most users it is the Internet that is driving their interest in becoming publishers and hence in content management but many large organisations in the publishing business have been implementing what are effectively content management systems for many years. They have been capturing text and graphics and images and managing them on content management systems and then developing output applications that will assemble the content to form compound documents and render them on paper, microfilm, CD ROM or the Web.

Both EDM and content management systems must provide users with the ability to attach metadata to a document/content object, to register each document/content object and log the document/content object into a repository; to apply check out and check in procedures and version control facilities so document/content objects cannot be overwritten and to apply document/content object level security so only authorised users can access and read the document/content object and only a subset of those users can edit the document/content object.

EDM and content management systems allow users to use a mix of structured index data and full text indexing to provide a flexible range of searching and retrieval options.