Most businesses rely on multiple overlapping systems for success – with document management and enterprise content management being near the top of the list.
It’s easy to see why both are so popular. Content is vital to the success of companies, with documents making up a great deal of the content a company maintains and puts out. But does this mean that both systems are the same?
Not quite. While their functions do overlap, and they do support one another to some degree, each system has a distinct role. Knowing their functions underlines the importance of why both are vital in a modern business environment.
Blogs, webpages, social media, ads, eBooks – these are countless types of content out there.
For most organizations, using content is a vital part of their advertising and promotional strategies. By publishing information that audiences find useful, companies can generate engagement of various types. This includes views, leads, and even purchases.
This could be the main factor that differentiates an enterprise content system from a document management system. This system is focused on publishing content – even if content is kept in hold for a while, the ultimate purpose is to put it out to the world toward external audiences.
Of course, a system for managing documents could help with content management. But the best content management systems are essentially publishing tools. They’re often integrated with tools to track engagement, make updates easy, and integrate with the company’s other sites and profiles.
Documents are one of the fundamental building blocks of nearly all business workflows.
From accounting processes to HR procedures to marketing campaigns, nearly every company department will rely on a large number of documents. A document management system is the tool that makes managing them much easier.
This is the key characteristic that sets a document management system apart from a content management system. The document solution is designed to manage information – even if it could be distributed to external audiences, this tool is designed to manage information within the company.
Document solutions are ideal in an age where business technology is promoting digitization. These solutions make it easy to store documents in any format a company chooses, as well as to share them, sort them for easy retrieval, and secure them from unauthorized access.
While these two systems are similar, their main focus is on different targets. Content systems are used by a company’s in-house team to publish and distribute content for customers and viewers.
Document systems could be used to send documents outside of the company, but their main function is to organize, store, and secure documents for smoother management by the organization’s team.
Both systems can be handy for taking information and optimizing it for more efficient use within a company. This can be helpful for clearing out paper clutter, staying organized digitally, improving security, meeting compliance standards, and staying consistent with workflows.
Another similarity the systems have is their ability to integrate with other aspects of a business – but even in this similarity, they have their distinctions.
An enterprise content management system can integrate with other enterprise software – this includes enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management platforms. Such collaboration provides more data analytics for better content creation, publishing habits, and engagement strategies.
Document systems can integrate with cloud systems and managed IT setups. The result is a document approach that works for companies no matter how large they grow and how complex they become. It ensures document processes are built around the company, not the other way around, so that document solutions don’t bottleneck productivity, but rather enable it.
It’s easy for companies to overlook the importance of managing their documents properly. After all, documents seem like such a basic part of business, it’s sometimes strange to think of them as needing their own managed services.
But their fundamental and widespread use is exactly why they should be managed properly. When a company’s information is properly secured, efficiently organized, and easy to access by the team, it becomes much easier to work in a productive manner.
Here at Doing Better Business, we provide the best document management solutions on the market. You’ll be able to embrace better organizational capabilities, support other systems, and most importantly, boost your productivity. Contact us today to learn more about what we offer.