Blurry products and features – ECM, WCM, EIP???

Sometimes I’m struggling to se the difference between content tools, and the lines between the families are notoriously blurry.

This seems especially case among Enterprise Information Portals (EIP), Enterprise Content Management (ECM), and Web Content Management (WCM), where I see a lot of overlap in vendors, product functionality, and marketing messages. Also to add to the confusion several vendors, due to accusations, have several overlapping product lines in the market.

An example is that if you're looking to implement Intranet-based document management, you could conceivably use any of those three types of products. Some consultancies will also try to sell you all three types of solutions, with the obligatory integration project.

My recommendation is to take a business approach to the project, and describe what solves your most pressing needs before selecting content technology, tools or platform. Describe the core of your business problem or opportunity, and then build the selection process from there. The reality is that these three different types of products have their defined strengths and weaknesses, and they tend to address different problems. By understanding what you're trying to accomplish, you can better identify the types of content technology you need.

My opinion is that the WCM products support fundamentally publishing scenarios and has the focus on semi-structured content and content delivery with employee-friendly editorial interfaces. There are also ECM vendors that claim that they have publishing capabilities, but in my opinion ECM delivery become more process oriented, and vendors often focus their solution into industry verticals such as e.g. finance, public.

Vendors also add to the confusion, and to be sure they have the best fit for the market they often market the same product for different categories of problems, and sometimes that actually makes sense. The promise of e.g. MOSS 2007 is that this toolset can conceivably play in all of these three (WCM, ECM and EIP) spaces to varying degrees, but Microsoft has different ways of getting there, and one SharePoint installation still will be implemented and used in several different ways.

Of course the solutions also overlap. For example WCM sites implemented as a ”Community-oriented” site may well look quite a bit like a "Collaboration Portal," which in turn might look like a "ECM Workgroup Collaboration" site. All in all this come down to the implementation, amount of tailoring and presentation layer of each delivery. So there is possible very little difference between the products, but on the other hand you should be aware that the tools approach your problems in different ways.

So my recommendation is that you should build a good specification and business case that has a good fit with your overall business objectives, and then figure out which type of tools that provide the biggest near-term value. This mean that you should specify and describe what type of need(s) and scenario(s) you're addressing, and the key objective in the specification is that you carefully outline what you're trying to achieve with which types of content. A little analysis here can save you a lot of time and money at later stage.