Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a wide ranging term that is sometimes incorrectly used instead of Digital Asset Management (DAM). ECM systems tend to be large scale repositories of many types of content held across the entirety of an organisation. As well as digital media, nearly all material (including operational documents and files) may be included in the scope of an ECM implementation. The objective of providing ECM is usually to offer a single interface where employees can gain access to all of an organisation's data. Although technically an ECM application can fulfil the same function as DAM, in practice most organisations and departments (especially those that have a lot of digital media like marketing communications) find they need a separate system as ECM tends to be too broad for anything but basic activities such as searching. Many DAM systems are being integrated with ECM as an alternative method that enables organisations to leverage the benefits of both.