Introduction
This article explains why Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is essential and how you can use Microsoft Office 365 & SharePoint as an ECM system.
After reading this article, you will be confident in how Office 365 and SharePoint can help you implement ECM in your organisation.
For organisations planning an enterprise-wide implementation, our SharePoint Content Management System services in the UAE cover information architecture, governance, security, workflow automation and Microsoft 365 integration.
This article will also help you bridge communication gaps between technology and business needs in most organisations.
Definition
An enterprise content management system is a methodology that ensures your organisation uses good practices & processes to store, secure, and consume its content.
Enterprise content management is not a technology. And SharePoint is not a pre-configured Enterprise content management solution.
It would help to implement ECM in your organisation with upfront planning. Upfront planning ensures you can apply good information architecture in practice.
And Office 365 & SharePoint is a platform and technology that can help you implement Enterprise Content Management in your organisation.
I hope you now have a clear idea of what Enterprise Content Management is and how Office 365 SharePoint can help you implement it.
Quick Tip
In your organisation, how many ways can you organise unstructured information?
Four –
- chronologically
- alphabetically
- numerically
- geographically
The core features of an ECM solution are as follows:
- Capturing Documents
- Storage of documents
- Retrieve documents
- Document editing
- Document security
- Metadata
- Versioning documents
- Auditing
- Archival
- Destroying documents
Start Your SharePoint Content Management Journey With Us
Top reasons why Enterprise content management with SharePoint fail
- You do not understand that ECM is a methodology with set practices & processes which are standardised across the organisation to manage content. SharePoint is a platform to ensure your organisation follow these practices and procedures.
- Implementing SharePoint as an ECM solution without proper project planning
- Building an ECM at a departmental level instead of planning and building an ECM for the entire organisation.
- We are not bringing end-users, IT implementors and other stakeholders together during the planning.
SharePoint Content Management
When you use SharePoint Content Management as an ECM solution, you need to visualise all aspects of the content that define a document’s logical storage and how you represent metadata. From an information architecture standpoint, favour a flat architecture and make the metadata as comprehensive as possible.
SharePoint as an Enterprise Content Management system provides the following features.
- Capture information by uploading, creating natively, MS Office client applications, Scanning and using forms within SharePoint.
- Centralised storage for all your organisation’s documents – SharePoint helps employees and other knowledge workers find the records and information quickly, collaborate on them, and share them with others.
- Manage multiple versions of documents, multiple formats in SharePoint and ensure the right people access these documents. Keeping track of compliances is easy with a proper audit trail of information.
- Deliver information to the right people with SharePoint. SharePoint makes it easy for employees to access data from anywhere using multiple devices like desktops, tablets and mobile phones.
- By implementing workflows in SharePoint, you can process information, collaborate & get content approved. SharePoint helps automate business processes that involve a lot of documents. For knowledge workers to easily access the information, it’s stored logically in SharePoint.
- Archive information or destroy them permanently when required. SharePoint archival policies and workflows help to ensure that old information is archived or destroyed when needed.
Quick Tip
SharePoint can store any file format, so it’s always wise to determine which file formats are permitted.
SharePoint & Digital Transformation
When you use SharePoint Content Management as an ECM solution, you need to visualise all aspects of the content that define a document’s logical storage and how to represent its metadata. From an information architecture standpoint, favour a flat architecture and make the metadata as comprehensive as possible.
In contrast with the classic team sites, modern SharePoint sites offer users the ability to capture, store, manage, process and preserve information digitally.
SharePoint is an excellent platform to transform your organisation digitally. With Microsoft now focusing more than ever on Microsoft Office 365 SharePoint online, enterprises can now focus on using the Cloud platform to manage their Enterprise Content Management Systems.
SharePoint offers all the commonly used Document management features to ensure that your digital transformation journey is a breeze.
Third Party Support
Microsoft provides an array of third-party apps through their Appsource. You can get apps designed specifically for SharePoint online from Appsource.
These third-party tools like Nintex, ShareGate, increases the value of SharePoint as an Enterprise Content Management platform.
Third-party tools enable SharePoint to cover the gaps in SharePoint to function as a full-fledged Content management system.
Workflow & Business Process Automation Using SharePoint
Business process automation can reduce the time and cost of completing a standard business process, such as document review and approval. SharePoint does this by managing and tracking the tasks of the knowledge workers and collaborators involved.
Create urgency to complete the process quickly using alerts and notifications.
Using SharePoint workflows automation, you can
- send reminder emails
- assign tasks
- task assignment and new workflow start emails
- archive documents delete them
SharePoint Content Management helps organisations implement the ECM methodologies and their best practices.
SharePoint workflow ensures that you can collect feedback, collect digital signatures. Not only does this help organisations to properly maintain information inside SharePoint, but it also provides essential meta information and versioning so that the correct information can be found easily by the users.
Conclusion
SharePoint as an Enterprise Content Management platform provides you with a rich set of tools to implement your organisation’s Enterprise Content Management methodology. However, to get maximum value from your SharePoint, you have to ensure you use all the features discussed above to manage the whole lifecycle of content in your organisation.
