We all understand the importance of an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system. An ECM helps to keep track of all organization information in a centralized location, helps regulatory compliance, can increase productivity, deal with auditing and versioning and speed up the business process. However, an ECM is typically a platform that needs configuration.

An ECM is an investment and initially, in particular, a large monetary and resource outlay. Stakeholders expect an organization to optimize the use of the company ECM and gain value as fast as possible. This value can only be realized after it has been configured and comes from users having access to the configured ECM and its content. That means access to documents and other data. Longer term value can be derived from other business process applications and integration to other line of business systems, like SAP or Salesforce.

We’re getting a lot of interest in managing projects on an ECM platform (Content Suite) and some of the most frequent questions are about Content Suite and not the project management functions!
In particular, people have questions such as:

I’ve been working with project teams for the last 20 years and seen them use a wide variety of project management software, from colour coded excel sheets to MS Project to enterprise project software. Throughout all of these projects, I’ve seen the teams rely on the same groups of features to get things done, despite having an excess of functions available in the software. What's the reason they don't use all the functions?

We’re getting a lot of interest in project management on OpenText Content Suite / Server / Livelink from industries that operate in regulated environments, for example the Public Sector, Utilities and Energy. And from project managers in organizations that supply these industries.

Can SharePoint work as an ELN? I get asked many questions about using SharePoint as an ELN and it seems like a good time to take stock and sum up the various points, both pro and con.

Firstly I’ll review SharePoint and some of the strong features that are absolutely required for an ELN such as collaboration, audits and versions. Then I’ll discuss what is missing from SharePoint and why it might be worth considering a commercial Electronic Lab Notebook.

How do you bring together tens of thousands of pages of certificates, drawings, procedures and specifications into one formatted, organized document with an up to date table of contents? 

And then do it all over again the next week with new content for a new customer?