Enterprise Content Management - my answers.

Enterprise Content Management

2 The Chaos of Content
List 3 sources of tension between IT and the user community, in terms of enterprise content management.
1. Content management used to be an IT-owned and managed initiative. Now, the business owners are demanding more ownership and control, and are getting budgets to help demonstrate that. But at the end of the day, it has to be a partnership
2. When you see the business side get more savvy about IT, it’s because the IT group isn’t meeting the businessperson’s needs, and not moving quickly enough.
3. The business side recognizes that IT has a huge challenge, so they (the business owners) decide to go out and get it done on their own. They then bring in their own things, and that just creates more chaos.

4 Unlock the Value of Content to Maximize Online Business Performance
Getting the right content, to the right person, is a popular KM phrase.
How can better content enable enterprises to optimize the customer experience?
By applying following points.
1. Strengthen customer loyalty
2. Achieve unified brands, messages and corporate image
3. Accelerate worldwide product launches and promotions
4. Optimize customer process efficiencies
5. Provide regulatory compliance and security.

6 Content Management vs. Knowledge Management
The article mentions some differences between CM and KM. Which of these terms describe CM, and which describe KM?
o Capture - KM
o Create - CM
o Route - KM
o Manage - CM
o Convert - KM
o Publish - CM

Is CM or KM bigger in scope, i.e. does one belong under the other’s umbrella?
CM is bigger in scope as it is more about creation, publishing, managing, KM is like going into details.

8 Managing Email Overload: The Smart, Secure and Legal Way
Name 3 drivers that dictate what an email management solution must do.
1. Email as a source of corporate records needed for regulatory compliance and legal discovery;
2. Email growth as an IT headache;
3. Email as a source of business-critical information.

Name 5 requirements of any email management solution.
1. Retain messages in compliance with regulations and corporate policies;
2. Provide a highly scalable repository able to keep pace with email volume growth and long retention periods to aggregate billions of email messages;
3. Facilitate searching as required for legal discovery;
4. Improve system performance and reliability;
5. Integrate email with other corporate records and content

What are some consequences of not having an email management system?
Without one, you will: spend more on administration; overloaded servers will degrade the performance of your email system; and users will be burdened with mailbox limits.

10 Today's Search: All The Power. No Pain.
What are some criteria for evaluating an enterprise search solution?
- Ease of installation
- time needed to learn how to build interfaces and put the server up
- the ability to easily manipulate the user interface

11 The Emerging Role of SharePoint in ECM
Do you think SharePoint is a good choice for students to search a discussion forum on COLWeb? Why or why not?
Yes, I believe that any software/platform that I can integrate with other software makes great step forward. I am the most happy human being having my Windows OS giving me the opportunity to work play and learn in 2 hours after complete disc format. This is yet another improvement even despite all the big bugs people talks about when it comes to MS stuff but funny is most of us never saw those bugs. Concluding I am sure that once I start using that I won’t be able to live without it.

12 Top Five Reasons to Outsource Document Capture
Name the “top five reasons to outsource your document capture project”.
1. Focus on your organization’s core
business processes;
2. Improve service levels to clients and reduce
transaction costs at the same time;
3. Faster and more secure implementation
of compliance and discovery initiatives;
4. Providing near-term cost savings
while avoiding technological obsolescence;
and
5. Cost-effective disaster recovery.

13 Will Your Next CMS Scale to Meet Your Demands?
Is content management something you buy, or something you do? Explain.
It is more something that you do than buy. You have to meet your organization current and future requirements and find scalable solution working for your particular situation but also allowing you to avoid upcoming problems.

14 The Value of SharePoint-Based ECM Solutions
What are the key chunks of functionality that an enterprise content management system should have?
Core ECM transactional content functionality: document scanning and imaging, report management and enterprise-class business process management (BPM)

15 How to Correct Your Organization’s Content Myopia
What is the best approach to transforming these business areas with Enterprise Content Management (ECM)?
o Accounts payable
To build a content-enabled solution for AP, start by scanning, classifying and indexing paper documents as well as capturing electronic invoices. Save time and improve accuracy using tools such as queue-based workflows and automatic notification. Integrate accounts payable information with enterprise resource planning and other line-of-business systems to ensure it gains the widest possible currency.
o Contract management
To implement a solution, begin by leveraging collaborative workspaces to share documents, track deliverables and hold threaded discussions. Enable users to access associated content—office documents, scanned images, email and more—from a common content repository. Develop electronic forms to streamline contrach requests and notify others about contract milestones and obligations.
o Client engagement
Content-enabled solutions for client engagement provide secure, central, Web-based workspaces enable collaboration across projects and around the globe. You’ll be able to track milestones and resolve issues, give clients visibility into processes from project launch to completion, and track key metrics across various projects
o Compliance
Start by automating the entire content lifecycle to protect content from inappropriate use or disclosure while ensuring its accessibility. Mitigate risk of non-compliance by automatically auditing content during any stage and enforcing policies for retention and, as appropriate, disposal.
o New product development
Create flexible workspace templates to enforce best practices and track progress across multiple projects through enterprise database rollups, dashboards and reporting tools.
o Enterprise marketing
With the right approach, you can streamline the marketing process and provide seamless access to marketing content. Coordinate campaigns, product launches and ongoing branding and marketing communications. Keep projects on track, reduce overall costs and exert greater control over brand assets using media repositories, creative workflows and virtual workspaces.

16 Widgets, Wizzbangs and Whoozits
New functionality on your web site should be in alignment with your company’s business model .
Give an example of when a discussion forum might not be a good idea on a website.
Cell phone provider website where customer turnover is very high and prospective customers could get turned off by negative content

17 Is On-Demand Content Management Right for You?
In a few paragraphs, explain when SaaS would be an appropriate alternative for content management?

There are some key characteristics that are making SaaS valuable solution such as:
When your applications need one or more components that are not very common in the standard products, for example Optical character recognition. In such situation SaaS is more cost effective as it distribute costs among all users.
When you are under tight time constrains and cant wait for programmers to solve your problems and provide you with solution, as SaaS is more configured than programmed it might be what you need. There are tons of tutorials allowing end users to familiarize with interface and so on, making it fast to adopt.
When you cant afford standard documented implementation where initial license cost is around 15% of total five years usage cost. SaaS provide less economical risk by providing monthly fee that scales up depending on usage.
When you don’t have your own data center and you have to choose either upgrade every single station which will cause downtimes. SaaS have central data center where upgrades are applied at once and all its users have current versions.
You must be aware that SaaS even though looking as a miracle wont work for all companies. You must evaluate your unique needs.