This document gives guidelines for a set of procedures and activities to be considered and/or performed by organizations when planning, designing and implementing various enterprise content management (ECM) technologies. The aspects or project phases range from initial business analysis through to vendor/integrator selection and technology implementation. The implementation of processes to manage electronically stored information (ESI) requires significant participation from the affected business units, if the content is stored and managed when created/received and controlled through the information life cycle following organizational policies and/or records retention and control policies are applied. As these efforts require multiple people with different disciplines, including technical teams, records managers and organizational management, this document has been prepared taking those perspectives into account.

This document is applicable to both in-house and outsourced systems, including cloud solutions. It can also be useful when dealing with specialized business systems. The term "enterprise content management (ECM)" (or "document management") used throughout this document is intended as an all-encompassing term referring to capture technologies [scanning, indexing, optical character recognition (OCR), forms, digital creation, etc.], management technologies (document services, workflow and other work management tools), and storage [primarily non-alterable or write once read many (WORM) technologies]. This document provides information to users related to the technical reports, guidelines and standards that have been developed for technologies commonly available in ECM systems.

This document is not intended to be an all-inclusive paper on electronic document or content management and does not attempt to influence any single technology or provide legal guidance or legal opinions. While there are storage technologies other than optical/magnetic currently available (i.e. microfilm, microfiche and hybrid storage systems) that are not included in this document, those technologies can be reviewed if determined to be appropriate by the end-user organization.