OpenText home page.
Tech topics

What is Cloud Content Management?

Get a free trial
Illustration of IT items with focus on a lightbulb

Overview

AI-powered cloud content management that seamlessly integrates into your crucial business applications

Thinking about moving content management to the cloud? Content management solutions continue to evolve, becoming more intelligent and integrated. Discover the productivity and efficiency benefits of SaaS content management, what to look for in a cloud content management solution, and the important role of generative AI.

Content management systems have come a long way. The first systems were created for records management and legal departments, focused primarily on compliance and minimizing risk, with little thought of how knowledge workers used the content they held.

Today a new generation of content management solutions are designed with users in mind, making content easily available to maximize information value and boost efficiency and productivity. These systems manage the lifecycle of information, from creation and storage to retrieval and distribution, while applying required security controls and governance best practices. Due to advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) tools, content is easily searched, analyzed, and summarized, uncovering hidden insights.

Cloud Content Management

Cloud content management is the next evolution of content services, shifting content management to a cloud environment to deliver even greater access, agility, security, and cost control. According to IDC, organizations are embracing the move to the cloud, with two-thirds of survey respondents making content services investments in the last 12-18 months, with 31 percent driven by technology modernization initiatives including a shift to the cloud.[1]

What are the benefits of cloud content management systems?

Cloud content management platforms continue to evolve, providing organizations with more capabilities and benefits, breaking down information silos, and facilitating content integrations across systems and applications.

Primary benefits include:

  • Reducing information sprawl and silos by bringing together information and business processes.
  • Increasing efficiency with improvements in workflow processing times and document retrieval speeds, reducing bottlenecks and accelerating operations.
  • Quick content access from anywhere, driving business continuity and productivity.
  • Improving collaboration by ensuring users have access to the most up-to-date documents and data.
  • Extracting value from content and data to drive accurate and timely decision-making.
  • Enhancing security with multiple layers of security protection, including advanced access controls, automatic content classifications, and continuous security monitoring.
  • Automating and accelerating classification and filing of newly created content.
  • Fast deployment with content management systems implemented quickly, able to scale as needed to support growing business and content demands.

What to look for in a cloud content management solution?

According to Forrester, the top use cases organizations expect content management platforms to address are focused on document-centric collaboration, document-centric process automation, and information governance.[2]

Specifically:

Document-centric collaboration: Improving employee productivity via content co-creation and sharing with project collaboration spaces as well as integration with productivity apps.

Document-centric process automation: Streamlining routine tasks, digitizing manual work, and automating business workflows with capabilities such as digital process automation, e-signature, and application design and development tools.

Information governance: Complying with laws, regulations, and rules via policy-driven protection and preservation of documents with access controls and lifecycle management.

Additional use cases may include:

  • Intelligent document extraction
  • Low-code development platforms for content-centric apps
  • Secure content sharing
  • Automation of knowledge work
  • Horizontal and vertical content-centric apps

However, not all cloud content management systems are created equal, with some focused on basic file-sharing services and cloud storage, and others designed for widespread, multi-functional enterprise use.

Enterprise cloud content management solutions deliver the performance, management, security, compliance, and integrations required for organizations’ complex and unique needs.

    • Security: Advanced encryption, multi-factor authentication, detailed audit trails, and customizable security policies.
    • Compliance: Comprehensive compliance frameworks, automated retention policies, and legal hold management.
    • Business integration flexibility: Extensive APIs, pre-built connectors, and custom integration capabilities.
    • Scalability: Enterprise-grade infrastructure, global content delivery, and unlimited scaling.

What are the core capabilities of cloud content management?

When evaluating cloud content management providers, choosing the right partner can make all the difference. Here are four top-line capabilities to help optimize and enrich digital content and set organizations up for long-term success:

  • The ability to address any use case: Each enterprise has unique content requirements. Inquire about a vendor’s ability to go beyond enterprise content sharing, solving challenges such as records management, content capture, and information archiving.
  • Integrating with anything, anywhere to eliminate process friction: Assess if content services and content collaboration solutions are easily embedded into the applications users already work in, such as SAP® and Microsoft.·
  • Safeguarding data and ensuring compliance: The necessary framework and controls to protect and manage critical information.
  • Deploying flexibly and globally: Organizations require flexibility when it comes to cloud deployments. Ask about options to choose from private, public, or hybrid cloud environments, as well as support from global data centers to ensure secure, interrupted access.

IDC provides additional suggestions of capabilities to look for from a vendor solution when modernizing content services applications:

    • An intuitive user interface for all users interacting with the application (such as HR, finance, marketing, sales, customer support, suppliers, and partners)
    • A modern, API-based architecture to ensure performance and ease of integration, as well as support for developers
    • Supported connectors to adjacent applications such as authoring applications; CRM, ERP, and HR applications; or collaboration tools to minimize custom code required
    • A workflow designer, workflow templates, and scripting capabilities for more complex workflows
    • An innovation strategy with support for GenAI
    • An innovation track record and a demonstrated ability to deliver enhancements on a regular cadence in a seamless manner
    • A strong partner and developer ecosystem for implementation, support, and technology integrations

What role does GenAI play in cloud content management?

Leveraging GenAI, organizations can extend the value of cloud content management platforms, putting an intuitive AI content assistant into the hands of users. With AI content management solutions, organizations can unlock new levels of understanding, productivity, and control. The benefits are far reaching, delivering a range of capabilities such as:

  • Creating new content
  • Identifying content across multiple sources
  • Translating content
  • Summarizing content
  • Suggesting related content
  • Sentiment analysis
  • Automated tagging and categorization

How can OpenText help you with cloud content management?

Discover what’s possible with OpenText™ Core Content Management, an intelligent cloud content management solution that integrates SaaS content management with leading business applications.

AI productivity: The secret behind workplace efficiency

Learn how SaaS-powered AI content management can help the 66 percent of organizations that have lost opportunities due to data inaccessibility.

Learn about AI productivity

Related Products

OpenText™ Core Content Management

Rapidly deploy complete, agile, and secure cloud content management

How can we help?

Footnotes

  1. [1] IDC, State of Content Services: Investing in Enterprise Content Management and Content Sharing and Collaboration, January 2024
  2. [2] Forrester, The Content Platforms Landscape, Q3 2024