Segmenting the Current Content Management Market

There is a wide variety of vendors in the market that have content management (CM) solutions. At first, it may be overwhelming to compare and categorize vendors with each other. A lot of vendors have a CM solution that does not fall in the category of ECM, because they are missing certain components of an ECM vendor. Several vendors, like Tridion, Vignette, Percussion, and Fatwire, focus more on web content management (WCM).


Web content management incorporates content creation, review, and approval processes, to publish content on web sites. They can be public web sites (Internet) or corporate, private web sites (intranet or extranet). WCM uses extensible markup language (XML), templates, and style sheets for content creation. It is often browser-based, making it user-friendly allowing non-technical employees to contribute web site content. These solutions also have integrated document management (IDM) functionality to organize and manage the documents within the organizations, library services (including check-in/check-out functionality, version control, collaboration, and user or document level security), and search options within the repository. Workflow is also an integrated part of document and web content management that defines the process of document approval and publication.

Enterprise content management, on the other hand, has several more components within a suite. Besides IDM, WCM, and workflow, ECM suites have the following extra modules:

Records management (RM) for the life cycle of documents. Documents are maintained from creation to publication, to archiving and even destruction. Records can be defined as a wide range of documents, like e-mail, faxes, scanned documents, legacy applications, and whole web pages.

Digital asset management (DAM) for rich media files. This includes text, audio, video, graphics, and photos. DAM is used for large amounts of video, audio, and photo environments, often in marketing or brand management.

Digital imaging (DI) for document capture and repository. Documents are often captured through scanning by vendors like Kofax or Abode. Faxes can automatically be converted into digital documents, and paper documents can be digitalized.

Document collaboration for employees to share documents. It gives employees or teams the option to share documents and open discussions about the content. Document collaboration provides users the ability to work together on the same content, without blocking the library services such as check-in/check-out.

There are some other smaller components that are included in ECM suites, but they are of less importance to the market. These may include e-forms, which enables customers fill out forms on the Web through XML data models. Another feature is e-mail archiving, which copies e-mails, including their attachments, in a repository with meta-tags, which are important for search functionality within the ECM suites. Meta-tags categorize e-mails, so information is stored in a fashionable order, and can easily be retrieved at a later date.