Gartner's critical capabilities for enterprise content management (ECM) analyzes functional components across key ECM platforms. We analyze frequently encountered use cases and review nine critical capabilities that should be taken into consideration when selecting an ECM platform.

• Over the last decade, Gartner client interactions have consistently shown that nine major areas of functionality effectively differentiate ECM suites from one another.
• Enterprises need to map their business needs against specific functional capabilities.
• The least differentiated area is the trusted system of record.
• The area of ECM with the highest variance between vendors is content-oriented process management and complex content component management.

• Follow a structured evaluation process when considering ECM platforms. Collect and prioritize business needs and map against vendor capabilities and strategies. Base weight attributes and decision criteria on overall enterprise importance of that element.
• Begin by establishing an evaluation team consisting of IT and business representatives.

The term "enterprise content management" covers the strategy and architectural framework that enterprises have for integrating a broad range of content management technologies and content formats. ECM can help enterprises take control of their content and in so doing, boost productivity, encourage collaboration, serve customers, drive revenue and make information easier to share. ECM suites consist of applications that interoperate, but that can be sold and used separately. Some vendors have added extended technology components, such as digital asset management (DAM) for handling rich media, electronic forms and document composition for high-volume generation of customized documents.

Content-Focused BPM. This capability enables process automation. Document-centric workflow is now being supplemented in many ECM suites by tighter business process management (BPM) coupling, including process analysis, modeling, rules, collaboration, integration and analytics.

Production Imaging. Capturing, transforming and managing images of paper documents are critical to many organizations. This capability is important for automating mission-critical business processes, compliance and records retention, and enterprise information management (EIM). Imaging, as one of the oldest content management technologies, is used as an on-ramp to electronic processes and archiving applications by companies across many industries.

Document Management. Document library services (check in/out, version control and document-level security) represent the foundation of any ECM platform. Beyond these core capabilities, though, are advanced document management features, such as compound document support, renditions (multiple representations of the same document), and XML component management that differentiate ECM platforms and make them suitable for applications such as complex technical documentation and language specific versions. Compound documents, which are documents comprising multiple elements, such as a Word document with a spreadsheet or an engineering drawing embedded in it. This feature is important, especially with regulated industries and manufacturers.

Document-Centric Collaboration. Document-centric collaboration is becoming increasingly important for an overall ECM strategy. It allows workgroups to produce informal or draft documents, share ideas and capture expertise to share on a wider basis. This capability provides the foundation for use cases, such as knowledge management.

Records Management. Records management supports the retention and disposition of business records in a policy-driven framework. It is necessary for regulated industries and those that are highly litigious, as well as for individual departments (HR, legal and finance) and processes (financial reporting) in every company. The ability to manage different formats (e-mail, instant messages, images, physical records, video, and audio) and automatically assign artifacts to a retention schedule differentiates vendors. A records management system must also have the capability to suspend routine deletion in response to legal hold requests. If your needs are targeted around records management, seek offerings that have e-mail integration or e-mail archiving functionality as well, since e-mail is often the focus for litigation discovery requests.

Web Content Management. Web content management (WCM) capabilities enable organizations to automate the process of publishing content to a website, to achieve greater content reuse and leverage, to foster better brand management and customer experience and to gain the ability to interact with content consumers in a more relevant way. WCM also can bring context to customers, too — analytics, preferences and services. All these are being harnessed much more effectively with WCM to generate return on investment proof points as well as improved customer engagement and loyalty.

Electronic Forms. Collecting information through browser-based forms can lower the cost of client interactions and improve efficiency. Many enterprises are using e-forms as a way of driving customer interactions to the Web and avoiding more expensive channels like call centers or direct human conversations. When you capture information electronically, you can validate that information against information in your databases.

Digital Asset Management. Non-text based formats (video, audio and photographs) require specialized capabilities for storage, indexing and retrieval. While not always a core component of an ECM platform, DAM is often provided as an add-on feature for handling rich media. DAM can also be a repository for inter- or intra-company communications, as well as rich media for marketing efforts. Better organization of rich media can allow marketing to reuse photos from expensive shoots for brochures, the Web and so on.

Architectural Flexibility. Systems should be available on a variety of platforms with different implementation models. Integration with ERP, CRM and other line of business applications is critical for many applications and is often a differentiator. Increasingly, support for integration standards (JSR 170, CMIS) and inclusion of Web 2.0 features are critical.

ECM is a strategy and management discipline, an architectural framework, and a set of technologies that organizations must assess and deploy to manage unstructured content. Diligent planning will ensure that the ECM initiative meets stakeholder expectations and delivers real business value. Respondents to Gartner's annual survey of CIOs indicated that their top three business priorities for 2009 were: improving business processes, reducing enterprise costs and improving enterprise workforce effectiveness. Attracting and retaining new customers was their number four priority, while targeting customers and markets more effectively was ranked seventh.

ECM enables organizations to meet these priorities and in many cases is vital to producing these business benefits. For example, well established ECM component technologies such as WCM, document-centric collaboration, and records management, are particularly valuable as enterprises want to make their websites more competitive, boost workers' productivity or support regulatory compliance.

We have identified five common use cases, as follows.

One of the most basic and common use cases for an ECM suite is as a secure repository to support regulatory compliance, business continuity, and other requirements. Because ECM systems can manage content as a "single source of the truth" and only present the latest version of a document to an authorized user, they are often the nucleus of a regulatory compliance initiative.

As e-discovery needs continue to grow, the value of having a trusted system of record also grows. By controlling access to content, by managing the versions of content, and by simultaneously reducing the reliance on less-managed environments like e-mail and file shares, enterprises can improve their overall data quality and facilitate leverage and reuse of high quality information.

Gartner user surveys cite and informal discussions with Gartner clients reveal that many organizations look to ECM technologies to make their processes more efficient and to reduce costs. By using ECM technologies, especially imaging and workflow, they can automate a vertical business process like claims processing, case management or new loans origination, thus reducing cycle times.

ECM also is used to support automating horizontal processes like accounts payable invoice processing, contracts management or correspondence management. Mission-critical business processes can also include those of a more dynamic nature, such as engineering drawing management, technical document publishing, and application integration to satisfy key process requirements (e.g., someone applies for a home loan and you call out to a credit reporting agency).

What most differentiates products for transactional business processes is how they handle images and other types of static content in the repository, and their support for workflow processes. Most ECM systems can handle modest volumes of scanned images as "just another" object type. Some vendors, such as EMC Documentum, IBM and Oracle, offer repositories optimized for handling high volumes of static content, including document images, with capabilities like caching, prefetching and workflow queue management.

Another typical use case for ECM is in support of knowledge management. Government agencies are faced with an aging workforce and the prospects of mass retirement, while private organizations must often deal with employee turnover. Retaining critical knowledge is paramount to document-centric collaboration, which enables users to identify and locate experts to help them improve productivity. It also enables the formation of ad hoc teams, by supporting user-created workspaces that can be set up, given privileges and removed quickly with little or no IT involvement, allowing companies to respond quickly to changing market conditions. These applications also capture and retain knowledge that might otherwise be lost because it belonged to temporary workers or employees that have retired.

A clear articulated Web channel strategy is critical for optimizing interactions with customers, prospects, partners and employees. Interfacing with enterprise systems becomes much more efficient when it is done electronically and when user needs and wants can be easily ascertained and serviced. Whether supporting business to business, business to commerce, or business to enterprise, the Web channel strategy must rely on a solid content management foundation to ensure efficiency and quality.

Web channel technologies that deliver improved experiences, customer conversions, and loyalty are a primary focus of many enterprises. The influence of the CMO in directing spend on marketing machines that leverage WCM, DAM, Web analytics, portals, e-forms, document composition, social community, mobile device support, and BPM is now obvious.

The ability to deliver more compelling, dynamic, personalized and media-rich content to any audience on any device and more accurately measure the value of the interrelationships of people, process and content has led to a breakaway of "WCM for marketing" from the ECM suite.

EIM is an integrative discipline for structuring, describing and governing information assets across organizational and technological boundaries to improve efficiency, promote transparency, support agility and enable business insight. ECM is foundation for enabling an EIM strategy. IBM and Oracle have the potential to drive the content management market forward by creating a powerful message based on broader EIM. Since they own the key stack components, such as the database, the information access, business intelligence (BI), analytics and reporting tools (and often line-of-business applications), they can bring together structured data and unstructured content.

Table 1 shows the relative importance of our seven critical capabilities in the context of these specific use cases.

In this research, we have focused our analysis on the six ECM platform vendors that Gartner's global clients typically rely on as the backbone for their content infrastructure. These vendors provide ECM suites that form the foundation on which clients are looking to build out multiple content applications or those which support multiple use cases. To qualify for inclusion in this research, the vendors must have at least $100 million in software revenue and they must provide all six core ECM functional capabilities natively in their portfolio, if not necessarily in a single product.

In this research, we have identified nine critical capabilities that differentiate the ECM suites delivered by these vendors in the context of specific use cases. Each of the products that meet our inclusion criteria has been evaluated on the critical capabilities, on a scale of 1.0 to 5.0, with 1.0 being the lowest and 5.0 the highest score, see Table 2.

To determine an overall score for each product in the use cases, the ratings in Table 2 are multiplied by the weightings shown in Table 1. These scores are shown in Table 3, which also provide our assessment of the viability of each product.

To determine an overall score for each product in the three use cases, the ratings in Table 2 are multiplied by the weightings shown in Table 1. These scores are shown in Table 3, which also provides our assessment of the viability of each product (see Note 1).

Building on its previous acquisitions of document capture, workflow and records management technology, Autonomy gained broad ECM capabilities with its 2009 acquisition of Interwoven. Interwoven had focused on best of breed capabilities with its largely independent document management, digital asset management, and Web content management offerings and was building a strong strategy around solutions. Autonomy's Interwoven WCM offering provides support for dynamic and compelling websites and the ability to deliver highly targeted content.

The strength in WCM makes autonomy particularly shine in the role of Web channel strategy tool. Autonomy's strength in collaborative document management with WorkSite as well as its information access roots provides a good foundation for knowledge management. It lacks strong BPM and production imaging capabilities, thus limiting is use for mission-critical and transactional content management applications.

EMC has aggressively positioned itself as a development platform for content applications — leveraging the right components to deliver basic configurations of its product for solutions buyers in diverse markets. Gartner defines content-enabled vertical applications (CEVAs) as applications designed to help automate complex processes that previously required workers to sort through paper documents and other forms of content manually. CEVAs help reduce the cost of exception handling and optimize the rest of the work by applying better process controls and analytics. They are a mix of content, process and domain expertise, resulting in repeatable and reusable models and solutions.

EMC's early example is case management, delivered on its Documentum xCelerated Composition Platform (xCP). EMC Documentum has historically been used as a trusted system of record and as a platform for supporting mission-critical processes such as FDA submissions, technical publications, and engineering drawing management applications. It has focused increasingly on transactional content management as well, supporting production imaging and workflow. Given limitations of its WCM offering, EMC Documentum is typically not used to support Web channel strategies.

IBM is the ECM market share leader by revenue and has a leading position in several key vertical markets, including financial services, insurance, banking and government. This lead is sustained by its product strengths in high-volume imaging, records management and content-centric business process management (BPM) applications, and its extensive partner service channel for developing and delivering content applications. As an IT infrastructure and services vendor, IBM has the opportunity to leverage its content management and related technologies in ways that its pure-play ECM competitors cannot.

IBM has embarked on a major strategic initiative that drives much of the direction and integration of its ECM platforms as part of its broader enterprise information management strategy. Since it owns the key software stack components, such as the database (DB2), master data management and the information access, BI, analytics and reporting tools, it has the potential to bring together structured data and unstructured content. IBM's ECM product family is led by IBM FileNet P8, IBM Content Manager OnDemand (CMOD) and IBM Content Manager 8.x (CM8) repositories. Collaboration and Web content management capabilities are provided in IBM Lotus Quickr and IBM Lotus WCM, which are sold as stand-alone products as well as integrated with the core ECM repositories.

Gartner believes that it is IBM FileNet P8 that serves most often as the platform on which its customers are building content-centric applications. IBM's ECM suite provides limited support for Web channel strategies.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 has been a very successful application in gaining seats and mind share in content management for Microsoft as well as for many of its partners. MOSS 2007 is primarily a document management and collaborative content management platform, though its influence in the global ECM market cannot be overstated. Its combination of its portal, Web 2.0, data management capabilities and ease of use is very compelling for many companies. SharePoint still needs to mature as an ECM offering, particularly in areas such as ease of content reuse, multisite management, workflow and enterprise-level federation capabilities, such as replication and multifarm synchronization. Now, it mainly supports basic and departmental level needs and is very strong as a basic content services tool.

Microsoft's position as a stack vendor has led to MOSS increasingly being viewed as the strategic platform on which organizations are building applications. While third-party software vendors extensions are typically required today, Gartner believes that will change over time. As the SharePoint product evolves (with the next version due out in 2010) and the number of partner-built solutions grows, it will gain traction as an ECM platform for multiple use cases.

Open Text, the second largest ECM vendor in terms of total revenue, has grown largely through acquisitions. Open Text has a large number of content applications suited for a number of horizontal and vertical buyers principally in government, high tech, energy and life sciences. The acquisition of Vignette — particularly its contextual content management foundation — could create a media services opportunity for Open Text, making it attractive for organizations building their Web channel strategy. Open Text, like Oracle, has a broad range of capabilities including document management, records management, document-centric collaboration, DAM and workflow. Its flagship offering, Open Text ECM suite, provides the rich support for team collaboration and communities of practice required for knowledge management.

Since the acquisition of Stellent in 2006, Oracle has slowly and steadily gained prominence in the ECM market. Oracle ECM Suite currently includes Universal Content Management 10gR3, Universal Records Management 10gR3, Imaging and Process Management 10gR3 (the 11g version will be available in October 2009). Oracle has transactional, collaborative and contextual content management functionality.

Oracle has built on the ease of use that helped drive the original success of Stellent. This extends beyond content authoring to template development, workflow design, multichannel delivery and multisite management. Because Oracle's platform has an overall good mix of functionality, it is one of the stronger performers across all of five use cases. Gartner believes Oracle is well-positioned to exploit some of the key trends in the WCM market in support of organizations' Web channel strategies. Likely moves are to provide tighter integrations with its recommendation engine and other technologies, such as its CRM business application.

Selection of the best ECM platform vendor for any enterprise must take into account the key use cases balanced against the occasional needs for additional functionality. In this critical capability research we identified the key use cases clients are asking about and evaluate the strengths of the dominant vendors' suites against those.