Enterprise Content Management in SharePoint

Computers make it easy for organizations to create lots of content, and lots of different kinds of content. People want information and they create an amazing number of ways to capture that information: documents, email messages, worksheets, diagrams, presentations, videos, and web pages, just to name some of the ways.

If this content is not managed, it can be hard to find what you need or track what's happening. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) with SharePoint products help by giving you tools to organize and manage content throughout the content life cycle, from creation to archive. SharePoint ECM integrates the familiar tools of the Microsoft Office system with the central management and collaboration features of SharePoint products and technologies.

In this article

Document Management

Digital Media Management

Records Management 

Web Content Management

Document Management

ECM in SharePoint products and technologies improves productivity provides the following features to help you manage a collection of documents:

• Centrally manage diverse content    Store content in a central repository that helps people find, share, and use the information.

• Easily work with document properties    The Document Information Panel enables you to browse and edit document properties (metadata) directly in the document.

• Manage metadata globally    Create term sets and groups that make it easier to organize and find content

• Make any document unique    Document IDs provide a unique identifier for every asset in the content collection...

• Save time and reuse settings     Content Types enable you to assign shared settings for a specific type of content, such as a manual or a specification.

• Control access to information   . Uniquely defined permissions give you a wealth of tools to control access to information at any level, from a single document up to the site itself

• Streamline collaborative document processing    Built-in document workflows let you start, track, and collaborate on document-oriented processes directly from Office desktop programs.

Digital Media Management

SharePoint products and technologies have integrated functionality to play and manage digital media content, such as video and audio. Here are some high points of these capabilities:

• Play media content directly    Video and audio players are built in to SharePoint products. You can play video and audio directly from a portal, team, or publishing site, from a community-generated site, and from managed learning and training sites.

• Use optimized media libraries    Media asset libraries in SharePoint Server are optimized for media content. All the helpful management features of a document library are available, such as metadata, content types, and unique IDs. In addition, media asset libraries offer thumbnail views of images and video, with built-in ability to play a preview of a video.

Records Management 

The integrated records management capabilities in SharePoint products enable organizations to store and protect business records in their final state. Organizations can apply information management policies to business records. This helps lessen risk of litigation by making sure that the information complies with regulations or corporate business policies.

• Improve legal and regulatory compliance    Implement policies for information retention, protection, and auditing to business records to guarantee that these records are appropriately retained. Audit trails provide proof to internal and external auditors that records were retained appropriately.

• Help secure business and important records    A secure repository helps guarantee that records are stored in a locked, final state.

Ensure easy litigation discovery     Make sure that you can retrieve information that is required for legal discovery in a cost-effective manner. Place a special hold on specific records to prevent destruction.

Web Content Management

The Web Content Management features in enable you to do the following:

• Create and publish content quickly and easily    Use familiar tools to create and publish web content in a timely manner.

• Maintain a consistent look throughout your web sites    Create approved master pages and page layouts that enable branding and navigation of the site to be specified once and reused by content authors.

• Lower deployment and management costs for your web sites    Implement a single multitier infrastructure for publishing content to intranet, extranet, and Internet sites.

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