What is content? What does content management involve? And what is special about enterprise content management? This introductory article will seek to answer these questions.
In today’s context, content means digital information. This information typically resides in text documents, audio or video files and other kinds of digital files. Digital information is easier to manage compared to paper-based information (even though it is vulnerable to its own special kinds of risks).
Content management involves managing the different stages in the lifecycle of content. The lifecycle stages of content are Creation, Updating, Publication, Translation, Archiving and Destruction.
Capturing data in an electronic form creates content. This could be through direct entry of relevant details at the time of a transaction or through transcription from original paper-based transaction documents into data entry forms.
In some cases, such as contracts, the paper documents are converted directly into a digital form through electronic scanning, and then made into an editable text-document with the help of Optical Character Recognition – OCR –...