Microsoft Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

The Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference (PDC 2005) is in full swing. There's more news than a body can keep up with, but this is one piece that the CMSWire audience is surely tuned to. Microsoft has been quiet about MCMS vNext for some time. News has trickled out via blogs and tech conferences, we're aware of Office 12, Sharepoint and MCMS merging, SharePoint being the future foundation, etc. But now we have some more complete info and (finally) straight from the horse's mouth. Its Billy's turn to put on the mantle of Enterprise Content Management.Quoting Microsoft:

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has become a strategic imperative for most organizations. Businesses have seen a huge explosion of structured and unstructured information over the last several years that includes documents, e-mail messages, voice mail, and video. A recent study by Accenture shows that more content will be created in the next two years than in the entire previous history of humankind. It will be critical for organizations to have a strategy to manage unstructured content through its entire life cycle—creation, management, storage, and disposal. ... Web Content Management Microsoft Web content management capabilities have been re-architected to take advantage of SharePoint foundation technologies combining both document management and Web content management. For example, teams can collaborate on a document within a document library. When the document is final, it can be published to a Web site from within the document library. Since the process uses a common workflow engine, approving Web pages will look and feel like approving any other type of content. Our Web content management capabilities also include multi-lingual support and enhanced browser-based authoring (spell check, table, and style support).

Read more about Microsoft ECM. For existing Microsoft CMS customers, you might be wondering how or if you should survive the transition. Microsoft has helpfully provide a white paper entitled Designing Your MCMS 2002 Solution for Reusability.