ECM suites have emerged after years of market consolidation. ECM suites provide a strategic framework and technical architecture that supports all content types and formats over the entire content life cycle. ECM suites consist of applications that interoperate, but that can be used and sold separately. Gartner defines today’s ECM suites as encompassing the following core components:

• Document Management for check-in/check-out, version control, security and library services for business documents
• Document Imaging for capturing, transforming and managing paper documents
• Records Management for long-term archiving, automation of retention and compliance policies, and ensuring legal, regulatory and industry compliance
• Workflow for supporting business processes, routing content, assigning work tasks and states, and creating audit trails
• Web Content Management for automating the Webmaster function and managing dynamic content and user interaction
• Document-Centric Collaboration for document sharing and supporting project teams

The Gartner Magic Quadrant below provides a high level assessment of content management vendors and their enterprise content management product suites completeness, maturity and integration. As firms deploy content infrastructure and some core functions become commoditized, these characteristics will be crucial.

‘Vendor’ focused the evaluation of ECM suites on products/vendors considered as market leaders with a strong ability to execute enterprise implementations.

‘Vendor’ selected the following products for evaluation against the functional, system and vendor/integrator criteria:

• EMC: Documentum
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Sever
• Open Text: LiveLink ECM Suite
• Liquid Machines
• Integraph Smartplant