Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

Enterprise content management (ECM) is the practice — and the software category — for capturing, managing, storing, delivering, and preserving an organization’s content: documents, images, web content, and other largely unstructured information. Its priorities are productivity and collaboration — capture, version control, workflow, search, and delivery.

ECM overlaps heavily with records management but is broader. Records management governs the subset of content that are records — information kept as evidence, subject to retention and disposition. A piece of content may live in an ECM system for everyday work and then be declared a record when it documents something the organization must account for, at which point records controls (retention, holds, audit, disposition) apply. Because the same content often needs both treatments, modern platforms frequently combine ECM and ERMS capabilities. (See also document management, which is narrower than ECM.)