Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has become a key business priority for most organizations. The amount of business information created and shared is increasing in size and speed every day, government compliance requirements are becoming more stringent, and key business tasks require accurate and fast access to records, documents, and other information. Without content management, information becomes chaos – unmanaged, not searchable, and processes rely more on employee institutional memory than technology. Additionally, users waste time looking for or recreating documents and information, and businesses may pay penalties for documents and information that are accidentally lost or released publicly.

Simternet’s ECM build on Microsoft SharePoint Server supports all intranet, extranet, and web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform. While taking full advantages of Microsoft SharePoint Server infrastructre, you will have the additional power to easily deploy Simternet’s applications developed on SharePoint technology.

Simternet offers scalable and flexible solutions for ECM solutions to provide a platform for some or all of the following, based on your organizational needs:

• Document Management
• Records Management
• Web Content Management
• Rich Media Management
• Archiving and Library Services
• Human Centric Workflow
• Business Process Management
• Transactional Content Management
• Scanning (Image and Capture)
• Document Output Management
• Customer Communications Management
• E-Mail Archiving

Scenarios for Business Communities

So now, how can you use a Business Community Platform to solve some of the specific problems in your organization? Business Communities are useful in scenarios that range across the departments in your organization – from Sales & Marketing, to Research and Development. Instead of specific point solutions for each department, an enterprise-wide Community Platform like SharePoint can help you realize cost savings through consolidation, as well as standardize processes/policies to increase efficiencies and transparency across departments.

Some of the business scenarios that can benefit from a Community Platform include:

• Professional Networking – usually run out of the HR department, professional networking and career development programs are important to help retain and grow employees.
• Communities of Interest – a natural, informal virtual gathering place where like-minded individuals can share their knowledge and participate in the discussion. Communities of Interest can help spur innovation and identify thought leaders within the organization.
• Centers of Excellence – a more formal, facilitated community to highlight best practices and share resources.
• Learning & Development – often times a huge investment for enterprises, community-based learning platforms are much more cost-effective, and also usually also more relevant and useful for employees since the content can be peer-to-peer shared and rated, as well as being constantly updated.
• Idea Exchanges – collecting and making use of the innovative ideas of your people at all levels of the organization can be a big challenge. And over-engineering this process can also lead to disappointing results. Communities offer a natural forum for ‘ideation’ where your people can freely share their ideas, and comment/rate each other’s ideas.
• Knowledge Management – much of the collective knowledge of an organization doesn’t reside in databases or repositories. Instead, it may be in a blog post or discussion forum. A centrally managed, secure Community Platform can help organize, protect and make sense of an organization’s unstructured data.
• Customer Communities – as well as internal employee communities, more and more companies are looking to strengthen relationships with their customers through interactive, participatory communities. Having the same platform for internal and external communities allows you to scale more efficiently and internalize learnings and customer feedback more easily.
• Customer Service & Employee Support – with the focus on cutting costs in today’s economic climate, communities represent a great opportunity to streamline an organization’s customer service and employee support capabilities. Community-based support services allow your customers and employees to help each other and find the information they are looking for without a costly phone call or service request.
• New Employee On-boarding – first impressions go a long way to establishing employees’ attitudes toward the company. And helping new employees get up to speed quickly and establish a sense of belonging, not only helps your bottom line through productivity gains, but also helps employee retention and morale. Existing communities that a new employee can plug into immediately helps them establish that sense of connection to your company, as well as helps them find resources/people to start doing their job.