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What Do You Call It?
It depends on your perspective.
The terms you use to describe your "content management" problem are different depending upon your industry. While there are some differences in meaning, there is a lot of overlap as well.
General Business - All Markets - Non CAD
- DMS - Document Management System
- ECM - Enterprise Content Management
Engineering Focused - AEC/FM Markets - 2D CAD
- EDM - Engineering Document Management
Engineering Focused - Manufacturing Markets - 3D CAD
- PDM - Product Data Management
- PLM - Product Lifecycle Management
The general term Document Management or Content Management is most often used by non-engineering firms who need to better manage their business documents. Key requirements include the ability for users to maintain correct versions and find, re-use, and collaborate with these documents. Business documents may be paper documents, such as invoices, purchase orders, or work authorizations that need to be scanned. Business documents may also be in their native digital format, such as Microsoft Office files. The term ECM (Enterprise Content Management) is used for document management solutions that span multiple departments, an entire company, or even enable collaboration with customers, suppliers, and partners.
If you are a manufacturing firm, you typically focus on better management of product data, hence the term PDM (Product Data Management) to describe your approach. PDM is focused on the engineering, design, and CAD users of your company's product data. Significant benefits can be found by extending the use of product data beyond the design groups to other departments that are "downstream from design." The term PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) is often used as companies move to share product data beyond these design oriented groups. PLM systems enable the sharing of product information throughout the entire lifecycle of a product, including sharing this data with users in purchasing, on the manufacturing shop floor, in sales, customer support, and other downstream organizations.
Many non-manufacturing companies (Architectural/Engineering/Construction, Utilities, Process, etc.) use the term EDM (Engineering Document Management). These firms have data management and collaboration requirements similar to manufacturing firms, but with focus on different types of products or services. Their "product" may be building design, infrastructure construction, or delivery of utility services. These firms share common needs for improved document management and collaboration between internal departments and with their customers, vendors and partners. As with all companies who depend on CAD technologies, these firms require EDM solutions that are "CAD aware" and that understand the unique requirements of CAD reference file support, web-based viewing with layer control, web-based markup, interactive conferencing, and distributed batch plotting.
No matter what your perspective or what term you use, "Content" is the key, and better management, sharing, and collaboration of content within a department or throughout an enterprise is the goal.
The following are some of the common content management problems that ImageSite can solve for you:
- A Web-based repository where all content created during the product lifecycle is stored and managed.
- Access by anyone from anywhere to securely protected information, using a web browser, eliminating the need to install additional software applications on their local computers.
- Store and manage any content in its native file formats. Users should be able to contribute content to the system such as CAD drawings, Word documents, spreadsheets, scanned documents and images.
- Full revision tracking so they can access previous versions of product documents.
- Workflows to manage content review and approval processes, including tracking comments and related revisions.
- Collaboration where team members can view, markup, comment and work together on content entirely within a Web-browser.
- Event tracking and notifications when other users interact with documents.
- Records management to enable companies to meet regulatory mandates such as ISO and Sarbanes-Oxley.
- Convenient search/index capabilities that allow users to easily find needed documents, CAD files, or other information based on attribute (metadata) searches and full-text searches (searches on words within files).
- Security to enable selective assignment viewing, markup, download and upload/versioning capabilities to various users and groups across an enterprise.
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No matter what your perspective, or what you call it, "Content" is the key. And better management, sharing, and collaboration of content within a department or throughout an enterprise is the goal.
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