To effectively manage the whole lifecycle of a document, it must follow a holistic approach. It’s time to consider changes in content production, distribution, maintenance, and reuse. Content services – dubbed the next generation of ECM – offer a focussed suite of improved capabilities than traditional ECM.
The focus of content platforms should always remain with the user. It should enable the user to control personal management (copy, move, hashtag) and organisational management (knowledge management, record retention, information lifecycle management).
It’s a common misconception that SharePoint is a terrific tool for managing team content, but for scalability, you need an “old-fashioned ECM system” or “proper records management solution.” Both these statements couldn’t be further from the truth, given the scalability of SharePoint. The platform can accommodate 30 trillion documents and 12.5 EB in a single SharePoint Online tenant. SharePoint also inherits Office 365 capabilities to create records and retain policy tags.
We think content services platforms will make it easier to integrate content silos and give the right people in the company access to business-critical information. But if you are new to this topic, this article is for you.
This article will give you a quick primer on what content services platform means in the current business context and how it impacts the user. Read on to find out more.
What are Content Services Platforms (CSP)?
CSPs are cloud-based SaaS software that allows users to create, share, collaborate, and save text, audio, and video files. A CSP is a set of services and microservices packaged as an integrated product suite that shares standard APIs and repositories. This relatively new platform is gaining popularity as a replacement for ECM solutions.
Difference between Content Services Platforms vs Enterprise Content Management
A CSP expands the range of what an ECM has traditionally done, like handling documents or managing data. Content platforms ensure the active use of content data by many users, workgroups, and teams across the extended enterprise. In contrast to ECM systems and their primary function of storing content in the enterprise. One can easily extend CSP’s security capabilities to external third parties.
At first, a CSP could resemble past enterprise content management products. However, there are three key areas where a CSP differs from an ECM solution:
a) A CSP can natively manage different data types and content types such as video, audio, social media, etc. and does it at scale.
b) Originally marketed as the “one place to store all of your content,” ECM systems became insular. However, a CSP can seamlessly link to all sources of information in addition to its content management capabilities.
c) A CSP is customisable. Simply said, it enables users to store, edit or view content as they wish.
Capabilities of a C S P
1. Scalability
The amount of information available to us in our environment is increasing exponentially. Modern businesses demand the management of millions of content pieces of different file types stored in other systems or repositories. This is not optional considering that even the smallest business firms have numerous content and data stores. So when you put this all together, you have a sizable volume of information to manage; if your content platform is not scalable, it will simply cease to function.
A CSP can address this issue quite effortlessly.
2. Flexibility
Nowadays, business runs on document types other than Word and PDF documents.
The enormous growth of file formats today necessitates the inclusion of content like video, audio, 3D files, and photos in addition to ordinary office documents. Handling any of these file formats – natively from within the CSP – is an essential feature since different file types are getting integrated into mainstream business processes.
3. Low-Code
Do you remember when every user had the same interface in an application? Those times are virtually over, even for enterprise software. The capability for customers to construct customised content applications in weeks rather than months or years is a crucial component of modern content platforms.
A CSP features a drag-and-drop development environment for customised interfaces that enable users to quickly and intuitively access the content, procedures, and data they need in a fashion that suits them.
4. Connected
You need to connect information systems within the company to provide a centralised view of your information assets and deliver personalised content-driven applications to end users. Demand for centralised information makes it the most crucial feature of all.
Simply said, the ability to link to different content and data systems across the organisation, such as Line of Business apps, various enterprise content management systems, and both on-premises and cloud-based file shares, are crucial.
You will end up with another silo without it.
5. Cloud-based
For a long time, businesses were hesitant to switch to cloud-based solutions. While this hesitation still exists in some sectors, for the majority of companies, the power, scalability, and possibilities offered by cloud technology simply are not feasible with internal systems.
To achieve this, CSPs fully utilise cloud-based storage, databases, elastic scalability, dynamic pricing, and web-based services in an easily configurable way. They also accomplish this in their native form without requiring extensive conversions from on-premises legacy code bases.
6. Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence permeates every aspect of our daily life. The AI era has arrived, from driverless automobiles to digital assistants like Siri and Alexa. Compared to humans, AI offers higher quality and volume of advanced categorisation, recognition, and prediction capabilities. Also, AI trained using your content can deliver better results.
Content services platforms can fully exploit artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to deliver streamlined automation of manual processes in content management. Using AI to manage knowledge will increase productivity and allow staff to work on more time-sensitive or complex tasks.
Benefits of SharePoint as a Content Services Platform
Here are some reasons why you should consider SharePoint for your content services needs:
- Thanks to its simple, clean user interface and strong management capabilities, it is easy to set up SharePoint and utilise it. SharePoint files are deeply integrated with OneDrive and accessible from anywhere.
- To connect users across your organisation, SharePoint enables the creation of exciting pages and knowledge portals, videos from Stream, and chats from Yammer.
- The combined power of content management and artificial intelligence can enable your organisation to increase productivity and make more informed decisions without compromising security.
- You can easily connect and automate Microsoft 365 apps via Microsoft Flow (Power Automate) with over 200 cloud and on-premises systems. One can extend the same for custom development with PowerApps and SharePoint Framework.
- Whether you are a frontline worker operating remotely, co-authoring in Office apps, emailing cloud attachments in Outlook, or working with your team in the new chat-based workspace Microsoft Teams, SharePoint delivers uniform content experiences across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
- You can save any file type on SharePoint. Not just that, SharePoint offers support for over 320 file types, including video, 3D formats, DICOM pictures, and various Adobe file types.
- Be it a small enterprise or a big corporation – businesses of all shapes and sizes can use SharePoint as their content platform.
- For automated data retention and records management, SharePoint uses Microsoft security features, including Data Loss Protection (DLP), eDiscovery, MIP-based encryption, and Advanced Data Governance.
- With more than 100 worldwide data centres, and compliance with standards like ISO 27001, FISMA, and EU Model Clauses, SharePoint provides users with reliable enterprise-grade security.
Conclusion
A new strategy for content and information management is the need of the hour, given the separated information architecture of today. Enterprise content management systems of the past are slowly getting phased out by content services platforms as they offer connectivity to external repositories via integrations and APIs and serve as a standalone repository.
Content is paramount to your business. So you mustn’t settle for subpar content platforms that can jeopardise the way you do business. Make it a priority by reaching out to us right away.
At Neologix, we have always prided ourselves on our forward-thinking and strategic approach to solving complex enterprise issues. SharePoint is more than just a solution to store files and collaborate. It is a transformational tool that evolves and scales with the ever-changing requirements of your business.
You can contact us by calling +971-521043226 or leaving a message at info@neologix.ae.
