Ecm costs

Enterprise level applications are not cheap. In particular, enterprise content management systems can send an organization's budget plans through the roof. Unless, of course, you are implementing an open source enterprise cms. So the story goes.  According to open source enterprise cms provider Alfresco, they are the alternative with a scalable, easy to use platform at a fraction of the price.We read their Total Cost of Ownership for Enterprise Content Management whitepaper. The whitepaper walks you through the licensing and hardware costs associated with several propertiery ECMs and shows how clearly open source is the more inexpensive option.

Two major competitors in the lower-cost segment of the CMS marketplace -- Ektron and GlobalScape -- recently started offering hosted versions of their products. This is good news for buyers. The traditional hosted players offer strong services, but at mid-market pricing levels. Ektron's offering is not a service per se -- just a convenient place to park your CMS with bundled product support. GlobalScape runs its version as a traditional ASP service. If you have very simple needs (under 1000 pages, just a handful of contributors) but limited internal technical resources, you could be running a low-cost CMS much faster this way...Ektron's Offering   GlobalScape's Hosted PureCMS

In order to continue their endeavor to offer the best service to customers and gain a competitive edge over their competition, Programmer's Investment Corporation (PIC) decided to implement an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system. This would allow them to improve productivity while reducing costs. Submitted by Integrated Document Technologies, Inc.

That was the challenge issued by Intelligent Enterprise magazine. You can judge the results for yourself. To quote: "The cost-effective portal and easily deployed record- and document-management module are among the platform's best features, but Vignette must smooth over disparate infrastructure requirements and stabilize its complex environment."

The cost, complexity and lack of portal integration of traditional ECM systems prevent them being rolled out to the enterprise successfully. End users turn to the shared drive for simplicity. This causes content to go uncontrolled, unaudited, and undiscovered. Alfresco turns your file system into a simple to use, compliant, auditable repository. Users can seamlessly access it through their native application or portal.

Do mid-sized companies and departments want integrated content management and business processing? Longtime CMS vendor RedDot is betting that they do. RedDot has just released a new collaboration and business processing package to join its WCM and portal products. Despite being a homegrown effort, the overall "suite" could be a bit better integrated (e.g. the collaboration and WCM modules use different workflow engines). But on the whole, we find it a useful offering for those smaller firms seeking to combine their e-business and e-content efforts without incurring behemoth software license fees. Just remember that the real costs in these sorts of integrated projects -- regardless of size -- come in the form of consulting and training expenses, long after the software bill is paid...Read about the "Extended Content Management Suite"

This midsize managed healthcare services provider is cutting costs and improving customer service with electronic document management technologies. ECM (enterprise content management) technologies aren't just for large enterprises anymore. In fact, most large enterprises have already invested in an ECM platform of some sort, and most new technology adoption is coming from SMBs. Submitted by Integrated Solutions Magazine

The ECM industry's major trade association (and all-around cheerleader), AIIM, recently polled 333 end-user attendees at its CMS seminar series. AIIM uncovered a lot of interesting data. Not surprisingly, Records Management remains paramount in the face of serious compliance challenges. But for those technology buyers seeking foremost to achieve cost savings and greater customer value, web content management rises nearly to the top of their wishlists. AIIM's survey confirms what we see everywhere: enterprises still need a ton of help simply automating their web publishing processes. There's bad news for some vendors, though, since AIIM's findings suggest buyers have sub-enterprise tier budgets...

7 Simple, Easy Tips To "Going Green" That You Can Start TodayLearn how "going green" can help you meet your sustainability goals, AND positively impact the bottom line.View this informative webcast to discover how you can:Adopt policies that reduce waste, energy use, and greenhouse gasses while increasing efficiencies / ROI.Create an "early win" using electronic content management (ECM) solutions that will save your organization paper, energy, time, money, and waste.Employ some of the steps that Xerox and its customers have taken to dramatically reduce their carbon footprint and cut costs.Gain 7 easy, quick and implement-able tips to turn your office green while driving business efficiencies and results.Mark Gilbert, Vice President and Research Director at featured analyst firm, Gartner, Inc., applies his expertise in high performance workplace infrastructure and technologies to describe the relationship between ECM and achieving corporate green initiatives

I'm attending the Gilbane Boston show this week. Many analysts value conferences because we get a chance to see vendors (and a lot of Web CMS players exhibit at Gilbane). But for me the best part is talking to end users. In that vein a few observations: many large enterprises have not yet transitioned their websites to an automated CMS; enterprises with homegrown systems remain (rightly) concerned about the cost and expense of that recreating custom logic in a commercial package; web managers are increasingly wary of "ECM" vendor offerings, but often have to struggle against internal dictates for supplier consolidation; terminological confusion reigns. In short, the Web CMS marketplace remains comparatively quite young. Enterprises continue to experiment, and we all still have much to learn...