From the course: Foundations of Enterprise Content Management

Document management and content management differentiators

From the course: Foundations of Enterprise Content Management

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Document management and content management differentiators

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- [Instructor] Now it may have occurred to you that almost everything we've discussed so far about content management looks more or less the same as document or file management. And you would be right. This has to be the starting point for content management though. And it has to be the starting point for any business that wants to manage their content effectively. I do not believe that you launch yourself into content management without having a very clear picture of how you manage documents now. In my mind, CMS is an extension of document management. It doesn't exist in a vacuum, and I don't think that it's possible to implement any kind of CMS solution without having your document management house in order. There are rules that need to be set around levels of sensitivity, a four-tiered system running from highly sensitive and business critical data all the way down to publicly available is fairly common. And when you have your data sensitivity levels, you need to define levels of interactivity to match each one. Who gets to see data, create data, edit data, delete data? And once you have those stacks in a row, you still don't get to move ahead until you understand the life cycle and flow for your different types of content. What are you using your content for? Is it used in more than one place? Is it connected to other content? Do you know how long it will remain published and available? So there are a lot of congruencies between document and content management, but how are they different? The biggest differentiator between document management and content management is the type of data they manage. Document management systems are centered around the management of structured documents, things like word documents, presentations, spreadsheets, PDFs, and so on. They might also have tools for digitizing hard copy and document lifecycle workflows. Content management systems do all that plus they also manage unstructured data. This could be things like audio, video, other media files, or even raw data collected from other sources. Content management is also more concerned with the organizational structure of information and how it flows between different channels in a business. And finally, content management typically has better ways of tracking and analyzing information usage. And by the way, if you want a little more information about categorizing sensitivity levels or defining access permissions, I'm going to refer you to my course, Information Management: Document Security. The course itself is weighted heavily towards SharePoint, but I think the discussions about sensitivity and access are pretty universal.

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