Article

5 ways Microsoft Dynamics users should evaluate their Enterprise Content Management (ECM) needs

by Bridget McCrea
Contributing Writer,

With the enterprise content management (ECM) market forecasted to grow from $4.4 billion in 2012 to over $9 billion by 2017, according to The Radicati Group, Inc., it stands to reason that a number of Microsoft Dynamics ERP and CRM users will be joining the ECM "evolution" within the next four years. In their current iterations, ECM solutions provide the technology necessary to capture, manage, access, store, search, and deliver content related to business processes and workflows.

With ECM, information can be collected from a variety of corporate content sources and formats including email, text documents, images, videos, audio files, websites, paper documents, and more. The question is, how does a Dynamics user go about selecting the right ECM solution - and one that works well with an existing ERP or CRM solution? For help, check out these five tips for shopping and selecting a solution:

  1. Identify your business problems first. Instead of hunting down ECM capabilities and functions, consider what you really need from a solution. "Don't buy a solution and then try to find problems for it to solve," says Robert Nelson, a long-time ECM expert and director, project management office for Dayton, Oh.-based Crown Partners' project management office. Instead, look at the short-term and long-term problems that you'd like to solve with an ECM system, and then shop around for solutions that can meet those needs.
  2. Maximize Dynamics' built-in capabilities. To attain optimal utilization of ECM, for example, Nelson says customers should consider tapping into Dynamics' built-in business process management (BPM) capabilities. "Looking to an ECM to provide BPM in competition with your Dynamics system," says Nelson, "would be a ...

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About Bridget McCrea

Bridget McCrea covers business and technology topics for various publications. She can be reached at bridgetmc@earthlink.net.

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