More About Basic Content Services

For many organizations, buying an expensive and complex ECM suite will be overkill. Their content management problems are more basic and they simply don’t need even half of the features - and definitely not the complexity and cost - of large ECM suits to address and solve their fundamental content management problems. It is no news that one size does not fit all.

Basic Content Services address the fundamental content management problems that all or most of the information workers within an organization are struggling with on a daily basis. BCS are to provide each and everyone within an organization with unified access and tools for managing their content. By providing a productive and efficient content management environment for each information worker, the organization can free time and energy to increase the overall productivity of the organization.

The core services of BCS are library services such as versioning and check-in / check-out functionality. In addition to that, BCS should include security services such as access control and rights management, metadata services for classification of content and metadata management, and search services. BCS can almost - and probably also should - be seen as a part of the IT infrastructure.

In addition to BCS, many organizations will problably need more advanced ECM services as well, such as workflow and collaboration services. Some common more advanced ECM services are shown in the illustration below.

Please note that the richness and complexity of each type of service in the illustration above is not considered here. For example, two organizations can have greatly different requirements on search services (just as the search services from two vendors might differ considerably in capability and features). But even if they have, both need some kind of search services to address the need of easily and quickly finding content.