CHRISTOPHER RILEY To say someone is predisposed to be in the field of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a little silly. There is no ECM gene, but there are certain characteristics that lead one to be interested in the space. You have a strong sense of order and organization. The statement “information is power” awes you, and you probably graze the boundaries of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or in my case full-on OCD.

I started my career life in content management, specifically in the area of image capture. As you will soon learn, capture sits in the early portion of the document life cycle, and at first glance seems so basic. But it is not. The sole job of image capture is to transform paper into value for a content management system, marrying physical documents with electronic. When you start to get into the details of how capture is done, its complexity becomes overwhelming fast. Do you capture all information? Some? What is the right format? What if you need to repurpose it? What do you do with the original? What happens when the types of content you capture are varied? Capture is just one piece of ECM, and as I’ve learned, all pieces follow the same pattern; they seem so rudimentary, but quickly you find that to execute on them well takes thought.

Think of all the unclaimed content or information out there. Think of the information that has haphazardly been pushed aside, a form of capture, and the implications that made on its findability in the future. We know how to generate information but not yet how to use it.

“When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.”

—James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

If you were not born with the ECM gene, don’t worry; this book is still for you. The benefits of ECM, I can safely say, are the same for all. Although it might be a taste of medicine for some, the results of proper ECM are felt everywhere.

Whether you insist on hoarding information and organizing it like I do or whether you operate within the confines of normal organizations, with their hodgepodge of personified drive letters and multiple unplanned repositories, the benefits are the same. A well-designed and implemented ECM solution is a chugging engine that gets you on the path to better content utilization.

We all intend to transcend ECM and the simple aspects of managing content and move into a world where the content we spend so much time creating delivers real value. And by real value, I’m referring to all those technology terms that really excite us: BigData, Cloud, Unified Information Access, and Semantic Web. These more entertaining technologies make one major presumption: that we have succeeded in capturing and storing the content in a way these evolving technologies can consume. So far we haven’t.

Today I believe that the technology world has finally mastered the capture of information, but we still are very poor at storing it, and we are only just now flirting with the grand potentials that come when we try to actualize it. Everyone needs the processes of ECM to be successful with their content actualization. This book takes the “why?” and “how?” of ECM and smashes them together into a comprehensive tool. A tool allowing you to form SharePoint into the best content storage and delivery machine it can be.

Writing this book in itself was an ECM exercise. And like all ECM projects, it was hit with detractors and challenges from every angle. While writing this book, I had a job change, fought the economy with the rest of the U.S., and finally said hello to the possibility of being a father. I dedicate this book to everyone who felt the blunt end of my stress to get it done, to Shad for making the efforts see the light of day, and to my beautiful wife and future child.

SHADRACH WHITE Enterprise Content Management is an industry-adopted term that is often referred or rather mislabeled by many. The reasons for this are due to the evolving landscape of information management. Whether it’s early card catalogue techniques, microform, document imaging, or records management, the goal is always the same. Take vast and varied amounts of information and organize it so that anyone can find what they are looking for. The truth is, managing and organizing information in any form so that it is easy to find after you store it is one of the biggest challenges that all organizations grapple with, regardless of the technology used. My co-author Chris Riley is a rare example of someone who analyzes and then organizes every bit and byte of information. He refers to this as the ECM gene, and I am lucky enough to have a few of those chromosomes myself. This is one of the reasons he can accomplish so many complex tasks across a wide variety of subject matter and operational boundaries. In this book, our goal is to share our experience, best practices, and our obsessive desire to organize information so that it becomes easy to find and share.

My first role in the ECM field was working as a systems analyst and network engineer in my home state of Alaska. I worked in all facets of the business, from sales to implementation, training, and rollout. After successfully selling, implementing, and supporting dozens of document imaging and optical storage solutions across Alaska, I moved to Seattle. Working closely with upper management, I implemented some of the earliest and most successful document imaging solutions in the Northwest at companies like Eddie Bauer, Boeing, and Costco. It was during this time that I became frustrated with the lack of proper expectations being set with customers prior to selling them an ECM solution. I recognized the need to create best practices for architecting a document management solution and building a project delivery model. Prior to that, the approach was to sell the software and figure out the details later. Unfortunately, this is still a common practice today, and the results are either shelf-ware or poorly architected solutions. After reading this book, you will have tools and examples that can be used to prevent these outcomes and help you deliver an ECM solution that balances your business objectives, technical requirements, and budget.

The importance of developing a plan and following best practices can be challenging, and in the rush to just get the software deployed and the project completed, many important factors are too often overlooked. To write this book, I have relied on my experience in over 300 content management projects where I variously participated as a lead technical architect, project director, and later as an executive sponsor. Because not all projects are winners, my goal for you as a reader is to share the knowledge that came from both success and failure.

In nearly every project, you will encounter challenges from one of three primary areas:

I have been asked many times about what the main difference is between a highly successful project and others. Without hesitation, it’s about the people. Without a great team, solid executive sponsorship, and engaged users who together take ownership, you can have all the resources and technology in the world and fail spectacularly.