As interest in mobile ECM grows, where do Microsoft Dynamics customers start planning a strategy?

With mobility gaining ground quickly in the workplace, the idea of putting corporate documents and proprietary materials on mobile devices for employees to use has become a priority for many companies. "This is the new frontier in productivity: mobile access to enterprise content management (ECM) systems," writes Yorgen Edholm in Get your enterprise content (safely) into the hands of your mobile workers.

"Workers across all industries are pushing to use mobile devices in their professional roles, and companies and government agencies alike are trying to find ways to make this possible without losing control over the security of information," says Edholm. "With a mobile ECM solution employees can securely access content when and where they need it."

Protecting Content on the Road

Of course, any time content leaves the safety of an organization's four walls and hits the road via a mobile device, there are security concerns to consider. As a repository for valuable corporate documents, ECMs are secure in nature but yet they don't always come with the mobile integration capabilities being sought out by today's organizations.

"The systems' lack of mobile integration is a great headache for enterprise IT organizations," says Edholm, CEO of secure mobile file-sharing provider Accellion.

He points out that the first companies to announce a solution to the problem of how to make the documents in ECM systems available to mobile and external users were public cloud storage vendors. "Their solution was straightforward: move the documents you want to share externally to our cloud, and voila! Your documents are no longer locked in behind your company's firewall," he says.

And while this approach ...