This blog post should get you excited to register and attend our webinar this Wednesday. In this AIIM Webinar preview, Cengiz Satir, Program Director, IBM ECM, and Ian Story, Senior Product Manager, IBM ECM talk about the importance of businesses having a seamless user experience for content management regardless of how, when, and where content is accessed, managed and collaborated on.

Knowing that you can access content securely is no longer good enough. Organizations want trusted content access from smart devices, but more importantly they are demanding consistency across mobile, Web, and desktop. If you want to hear more on this topic, please attend this webinarhosted by AIIM’s President, John Mancini

Join John and Cengiz at 2 PM EST on May 15 for:

How Mobile is your ECM? 3 key ingredients to make it so

Q:In the “always on” world that we live in, it should be no surprise that businesses are looking to incorporate mobile content access and management as part of their broader enterprise content management strategy. What do you think are some of the key obstacles most organizations have encountered to date?

Cengiz:Security is certainly one of the first things that comes up, but what we hear more often from customers these days is that the user experience has to be simple and consistent with how their users access and manage content from office applications and from the Web. Without that consistency, people from both IT and the business know they will have an uphill battle with training and the adoption of any mobile content application they may decide to deploy. We don’t think that businesses can afford to separately purchase a set of capabilities that differ across their desktop, Web, and mobile.

Q:Ian, I understand that not long ago you were a customer of IBM’s. Coming from the customer angle can you comment on the importance of a seamless and secure approach to mobile ECM?

Ian: Absolutely, for over a decade, I was an ECM customer, not just of IBM, but using competing ECM products as well, in industries as diverse as manufacturing and financial services. From a customer’s point of view, whether I’m scanning supporting documents with a mobile device at a branch, or looking up an equipment maintenance manual on the shop floor, I want consistency in the experience – I don’t want to have to build out different configurations for Web, office, and mobile. I don’t want to manage different apps, different permissions, train my users on different interfaces, setup different servers, etc. This applies to all my ECM systems, not just IBM, and it is this seamless, smart and secure approach to managing content that IBM delivers that saves me all these headaches as a customer, even if that content happens to be in a legacy, non-IBM, repository.

Q: What are some of the other ways customers can extend a mobile content platform of this nature?

Ian: You want to pay attention to standards. Is your provider adhering to industry standards so you don’t have to learn proprietary technology? Look for standards such as REST APISs, HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3 to make your life easier. 

Q: And Cengiz, just to close out the conversation on mobile ECM – do you feel there is a natural synergy in and around how content is being consumed today, e.g., social elements such as likes, tags, comments, following, etc.?

Cengiz: Today’s modern business world is highly competitive, and because of that, we are always looking for new ways to maximize our investments, while delivering innovative new products and solutions to our customers. The balancing act of addressing business and IT challenges while staying competitive is something all companies struggle with.

At the end of the day, success comes down to an organization’s ability to consume, produce, and manage content in the context of the work they do - regardless of how, when, and where they are in the world. And being able to deliver trusted content to business users in a contextual, social manner is directly related to an organization’s ability stay relevant and competitive.

The ability to deliver insights into the activities, projects, and content that we work on daily is a tremendous advantage for organizations and businesses. By “intuitively deliver” I mean the ability to bring trusted content to you wherever you are through social tagging and following – the ability to instantly see updates to content from people that have the right expertise. And the ability to see who has commented, liked, and downloaded provides another degree of insight to business content that is not only innovative, but a necessity for businesses going forward. The delivery of contextual feedback provides instant access to accurate and relevant information, knowledge, and expertise on the work you are doing right now– your business critical content.