The Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Collaboration layer represents content-related capabilities such as ways to capture, work together on, and search structured and semi-structured content. This layer uses workflows to automate processes related to documents, such as versioning. Finally, it manages the entire content lifecycle with a common set of tools.

This layer includes archiving, retaining, and protecting documents, records, Web content, and email messages in accordance with compliance policies and business processes. It also covers co-authoring and self-publishing with blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds, in addition to people-centric social computing abilities such as skills catalogs and social networking. ECM and Collaboration allows workspaces and portals to be integrated with Line of Business (LOB) applications for reporting and analytics, and composite applications to provide a multidirectional flow of LOB data.

This layer also lets you create federated relationships with trusted partners and expose online presence in a secure manner. By taking ECM and Collaboration into account, you can safeguard confidential documents—both online and offline—against unauthorized use inside and outside the firewall. You can let users populate forms from email and mobile devices, which means you can extend business processes beyond corporate firewalls. IT can manage rights through centralized administration, auditing, revocation, and exclusion.

Examples of products with ECM and Collaboration capabilities are Microsoft SharePoint Services or Lotus Notes.

Architectural pre-requisites: Infrastructure, Security, Data, SOA and BPM, IT Process

Architectural recommendations: Integrated Communications

Solution patterns ECM and Collaboration enables:User Experience, Business Intelligence, Web and Social Computing