Unstructured information represents 80% of the content within today’s enterprises and government organizations, and the amount of it is growing rapidly. The reasons for controlling and managing this information are myriad, ranging from employee productivity to consistent branding to customer service to legal compliance.
The components of “enterprise content management” that address these areas include document management, records management, image management, web content management, digital asset management, email management, collaboration, and a few others. The broad range of these technical areas have helped put the “enterprise” into ECM. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that an entire enterprise can benefit from ECM.
Due to the high cost of traditional ECM software, its rollout across a typical enterprise has been stunted. Generally, we find that ECM technology is utilized by only 20% of an enterprise.
So we have a large gap: 100% of employees generate/update/utilize enterprise content, but ECM technologies reach only 20% of those employees. A majority of enterprise content is thus unmanaged, negatively impacting productivity, customer loyalty, compliance, etc.
Enter open source, with its fundamental cost advantages.
But can an open source approach really address the broad range of “enterprise” content management? To date, most open source content management software has focused on web content — leading examples include Joomla, eZ publish, Plone, Drupal, and Typo3 (relatedy, almost a quarter of the web is powered by an open source cms). And a few, including Alfresco and Magnolia, provide robust collaborative document management capabilities.
But until just a few days ago, it was near impossible to craft open source solutions for records management, business process management, and scanned document image management.
Enter Alfresco’s preview release of version 1.4, which includes basic support for records management:
Alfresco Launches First Open Source Records Management Solution
and for business process management, complex workflow, and scanned document management:
Alfresco Extends Leadership With Production Ready Open Source Business Process Management
Bottom line: an open source approach to full “E”CM is looking more and more feasible.
