I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again that I think one of the most important areas of improvement and innovation in the latest release of SharePoint is in the area of Enterprise Content Management (ECM). In SharePoint ECM covers a vast array of topics all centered on managing the entire life cycle of content including the following:

• Web Content Management
• Records Management
• Document Management
• Digital Asset Management
• Web Analytics
• EDiscovery
• Managed Metadata
• Enterprise (syndicated) Content Types
• Variations (for multilingual scenarios)
• Content Deployment
• Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS)

As you can see, it covers a HUGE surface of SharePoint Server 2010. What I like most about ECM in SharePoint 2010 is Microsoft’s approach which differs from so many other ECM vendors. In traditional scenarios users have to modify how they work to participate in ECM scenarios which does not exactly encourage them to do. That’s why analysts have stats saying 60% of all ECM deployments fail. Microsoft’s approach in SharePoint 2010 is to integrate ECM capabilities across this platform (SharePoint) that so many people are heavily invested in. This way you can leverage records and official files along side collaborative content or implement policies to setup a retention schedule so your SharePoint storage isn’t on this exponential (and steep) curve. You can leverage the reporting content rollup capabilities in regular old team sites. This approach should make ECM scenarios more appealing to end users and records managers alike!

The ECM team has been pumping out a wealth of fantastic details on their team blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ecm) as well as in other formats, not to mention the numerous non-Microsoft bloggers out there. Check out some of the recent posts by folks on the product team, kicking off with Group Program Manager for ECM Jim Masson:

• SharePoint 2010 – Delivering on the Promise
• Introducing Records Management in SharePoint 2010
• Introducing Document Management in SharePoint 2010
• Introducing Web Content Management in SharePoint 2010
• EDiscovery in SharePoint Server 2010
• Introducing Web Analytics in SharePoint 2010
• Web Authoring in SharePoint 2010
• Variations in SharePoint 2010 – Connecting People with Content
• Announcing the CMIS Connector for SharePoint
• Web Analytics in SharePoint 2010: Insights into Reports and Metrics
• View Changes Makes In-Browser Content Localization Easier
• What’s New with the Content Query Web Part

In addition, Ryan Duguid, Senior Product Manager for SharePoint ECM, gave fantastic interview recently on the SharePoint Pod Show (episode #46). What I love is how Ryan does a great job not only showing how ECM plays across the platform, but presents it in a way that’s very easy to understand where you’ll quickly get value out of ECM when you leverage the capabilities out-of-the-box. Give it a listen!