ECM and CMS what is the difference?

[seraphon]

Hi

I m on the stage of doing reports of Alfresco and when I m about to give a definition of Alfresco I stumble on some definitions.

I know that Alfresco is refered as a CMS and also as a ECM.
But what is exactly the difference between the 2 terms?
CMS stands for content management systems, and ECM for enterprise content management.
I guess that ECM is included in CMS meaning all ECM are CMS.

But do the ECM have basic features that most CMS dont have or is it just a fancy name to indicate that a specific CMS is used for enterprise business?

Can someone please enlightened me?

Regards
Seraphon

[mikeh]

Have you tried here*..?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_Content_Management


Mike


* May or may not be useful, but usually a good starting point

[seraphon]

yep of course, and to me they both are the same. Like I said it seems to me that ECM is just a fancy name to categorize some CMS.

If you want to know the source of my confusion, its just that Alfresco is qualified everywhere(not really everywhere but you understand what I mean) as a CMS.
But on the about US in the Alfresco homepage, it is written as if it was a glorious fact that Alfresco is a ECM.
What value does saying that Alfresco is a ECM add compared to just saying its a CMS?

Regards
Seraphon

[mikeh]

The industry seems to classify CMS as mostly belonging to purely Web content, whereas Alfresco has its roots in document management which is possibly why there's confusion.

In general, ECM systems are more geared towards processing and collaboration of content and tend to be deployed to solve different problems and perform different tasks to a web CMS. As an example, very few web CMS support document transformation and workflow, whereas these would be expected in an ECM.

Because Alfresco is built upon the ECM principles, as well as supporting "traditional" web CMS technologies, you're getting the best of both worlds!


Mike

[seraphon]

well thank you for the clarification but I think this should be mentionned more learly in the wiki because I m sure I am not the only one who was confused by it.

On a side note, I think the french wikipedia page on CMS is more detailed than the english one.

Regards
Seraphon