What is Enterprise Content Management Software?

Introduction

Enterprise content management (ECM) software enables companies to manage, distribute, and organize unstructured content like web pages, emails, product information, surveys, accounting or health records, images, and documents. Organizations use this platform to store, edit, track, and collaborate on content production and other information-associated projects, while maintaining appropriate and predefined security levels. Staff at all levels of a company can use ECM software to access and share information based on role-based user privileges delegated by a system admin.

ECM applications are compatible with a range of file formats including office productivity tools (OCF, XLS, DOC), email, web standard (HTML, XML), CAD files, and image files (PNG, TIFF, JPEG). In short, ECM software functions as an enterprise solution to securely store large volumes of content, share information, develop and manage workflows, enable team collaboration, and integrate with other popular programs like ERP products.

Features of Enterprise Content Management Software

Effortless Administration

ECM software offers an admin dashboard where you can manage all the work related to content creation. For instance, you can keep track of scheduled content and associated assets, monitor administrator and site activity, add functionality via plugins and modules, manage notifications for tasks, and administer multiple platforms and sites, if needed. In short, the dashboard decreases complexity and streamlines content creation.

Detailed Analytics

Any good ECM system should integrate with leading analytics solutions – especially Google Analytics – to enable you to monitor your KPIs directly from your dashboard. The analytics capability helps admins to understand where important audiences are based, the technology they use, how they engage with content on different platforms, and which content pieces are popular, so they can improve the content strategies. Thus, the ECM software should help your team to extract the needed business insights.

Social Media Integration

Social networks are key places to reach and engage with your crucial audiences. Therefore, ECM software should make it simple for you to add social sharing buttons on your content pieces and website pages to encourage readers to share them with their followers.

Inbuilt SEO Features

On-page SEO is important to ensure your website ranks high on Google and other search engines. A quality ECM platform offers inbuilt SEO capabilities to assist you to automatically produce URLs that function for both search engines and readers. Plus, it helps you add your page titles and meta descriptions, and authenticate with Bing and Google WebMaster Tools. Also, you need to avoid duplicate content, comply with accessibility polices, and add alt tags for pictures. Finally, the software should support structured data and microdata to improve your search engine results.

Robust Publishing Functions

Publishing tools are vital for any good ECM solution. The system should adapt to the content type you wish to publish – including long articles and short news pieces with custom layout designs to landing pages with embedded files – and include this in the overall publication process. In addition, the program should handle adding video and images, content tagging, and SEO from inside the publishing interface. Most importantly, the interface needs to simple to understand and intuitive even for lay users.

Benefits of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Software

ECM software should permit you to the do the following tasks:

• Centralize collateral in a single repository
• Simplify workflow
• Integrate with other kinds of content management solutions to deliver all-inclusive ECM services
• Ensure government compliance via rigorous maintenance of lifecycle, approvals, permissions, and file security
• Automate business processes and make them documented, structured, and auditable
• Encourage productive collaboration in your company with shareable and readily available content
• Reduce file redundancy and enhance staff productivity
• Connect, access, maintain, manage, visualize, and eliminate siloed content databases with one all-encompassing architecture