Enterprise Content Management Capabilities of SharePoint

In the last few decades, computers and productivity software have made it easier than ever for organizations to create diverse kinds of content such as documents, worksheets, presentations, e-mail messages, videos, and Web pages. This ease of content creation has resulted in an explosion in the volume of unstructured content that organizations must manage. Because this content is typically not managed or organized in any consistent way, the information in this content is inaccessible to employees. This prevents organizations from achieving improvements in employee productivity, process efficiency, and communication.

ECM and the Content Life Cycle
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) helps organizations overcome the challenges of unmanaged content. Microsoft SharePoint 2007 is central to Microsoft ECM solutions, and extends content management to every employee in an organization by integrating with familiar tools like Microsoft Office. Microsoft's ECM solution provides capabilities for managing the entire life cycle of content — from creation, to editing and collaboration, to expiration — on a single unified platform.

SharePoint 2007 helps organizations manage the entire life cycle via a distinct sets of features which enable organizations to:

• Manage Diverse Content: The document management capabilities in SharePoint 2007 help organizations consolidate diverse content from multiple locations into a centrally managed repository with consistent categorization. Integrated search capabilities then help people find, share, and use this information. Content can also be protected from unauthorized access. Collaboration tools, like as workflows, help people work better together in creating, reviewing, and approving documents in a structured way.
• Satisfy Compliance & Legal Requirements: Integrated records management capabilities in SharePoint 2007 enable organizations to store and protect business records in their final state. Organizations can apply expiration policies to these records to ensure they are retained for the appropriate time period to comply with regulations or corporate business policies, 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 upon specific records under legal discovery to prevent their destruction.
• Efficiently Manage Multiple Web Sites: SharePoint 2007 offers Web content management capabilities enable people to publish Web content using an easy-to-use authoring tool and a built-in approval process. Employees can upload content to Web sites in a timely manner without extensive support from IT. Templates in the form of master pages and page layouts enable organizations to apply consistent branding to pages. SharePoint 2007 also offers a single deployment and management infrastructure for intranet, extranet, and Internet sites, as well as for multilingual sites.

Examples of What You Can Do With ECM

• Document Management
  Organizations can use Document Center sites as a centralized repository to create, organize, edit, and review all customer-facing external publications, such as user manuals and product specification sheets. Writers can use workflows content in the Document Center to manage the review and editing process for documents that they create.
  
  Document management features in SharePoint 2007 enable you to:
• Save time and easily reuse information: You can organize and classify content within a Document Center site to provide a consistent method for organizing, categorizing, navigating through, and quickly searching for information.
• Help protect sensitive information: You can help safeguard documents with integrated rights management that travels with documents wherever they may go when downloaded from a site. You can specify user access rights for individual items in a library. You can also use the Document Inspector in 2007 Microsoft Office system desktop programs to remove metadata from documents, presentations, and worksheets before final publication.
• Streamline collaborative document creation: With built-in document workflows, you can initiate, track, and collaborate on document-oriented processes directly from 2007 Office release desktop programs. Workflow task information is displayed in the desktop program, helping to ensure that the workflow participants follow the workflow steps properly

 

• Records management
  Legal departments can use a Records Center site template to archive important documents, such as leases, contracts, and license agreements. The Records Center site is accessible only to a handful of employees in the Legal department. This helps ensure that vital business records are kept secure.
  
  The records management features in SharePoint 2007 enable you to do the following:
• Improve legal and regulatory compliance: You can apply information retention, protection, and auditing policies to business records to help ensure that these records are appropriately retained.
• Help secure business and vital records: A security-enhanced repository, called a Records Center site, helps ensure that records are stored in a locked, final state.
• Ensure easy litigation discovery: You can help ensure that information required for legal discovery can be retrieved in a cost-effective manner and placed on hold according to the discovery requirements.

 

• Web content management
  Human Resources (HR) departments can use the publishing features that are part of the Web content management capabilities in SharePoint 2007 to create and update information that is published for all employees on the company's HR intranet portal.
  
  The Web content management features in SharePoint 2007 enable you to do the following:
• Create and publish content quickly and easily: Business groups can create and publish Web content in a timely manner with easy-to-use authoring tools and integrated workflows.
• Maintain a consistent look and feel throughout your Web sites: You can provide 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 for your Web sites: You can implement a single multitier infrastructure for publishing content to intranet, extranet, and Internet sites.