So, here we go with another new acronym for document management. CSP or Content Services Platforms is the latest set of letters trying to describe something new in document management. While I get the idea of managing the content where it resides, the need for development to make these solutions work seems to create a new burden on implementers.

Oh, and how does DropBox rate as a “Major Player” in the market. Please.

By Keith Shaw – As digital technologies have transformed the way people create, move, and store their data over the decades, managing the multitude of physical documents and digital data produced by a company has remained an ongoing challenge for businesses. Technologies such as cloud-based apps and services, along with regulatory requirements around the storage and protection of customer data, have required companies to explore technology solutions for document and data management.

In earlier days, this meant investing in a document management system (DMS), which helped companies digitally store and manage paper-based and online documents. The rise of web-based technologies created content management systems (CMSes), which managed digitally created content, but also included formats such as audio, video, images, and HTML-based files.

Then enterprise content management (ECM) systems emerged, with ECM being a catch-all for a set of processes and tools that companies used to capture, store, protect, retrieve, and manage business information. Processes such as content lifecycle management, digital asset management, workflow management, information governance, and collaborative features joined the mix in managing documents, along with disaster recovery and advanced security features.

Although all these acronyms have remained in use to some extent, the lines between them have blurred over the years as vendors have added more capabilities. Today, managing content is less about the types of documents (physical versus digital, or format type) and more about whether the content is used in an internal- or external-facing fashion, said Holly Muscolino, group vice president for content strategies and future of work at IDC. The evolution of document management and content management systems has overlapped to the point where modern content systems can handle any document type, workflow, or process, she said. Read On: