Enterprise content management comprises the management of all types of content to be found in the enterprise. The goal here is to have one tool capable of handling any content regardless of the origin, format and use of the components.

Document management deals with documents that can occur in multiple formats such as PDF, Microsoft Office, etc. but will typically be represented by a file. After the creation of content which will typically happen outside of the document management system through a more or less integrated authoring software like an office application, the focus is on collaboration on these files, organizing the storage, access and the management of the content as well as its meta data to support all these features.

Although many open source and commercial applications that are useful for managing documents are designed for managing structured content and collaboration also, this white paper will focus strictly on document management use cases. For further reading on content management use cases we refer to our white paper "Content Management Problems and Open Source Solutions".