Actual trends in ECM

The aim of this thesis is to introduce the actual trends in the ECM market and the impact of the continuous evolution of the IS/ICT field on the mentioned area. Throughout this thesis, the main definitions and characteristics of the ECM system components are presented, there is a brief description of the situation at today's ECM products market and then there is a characterization of this year's and futures main ECM trends. There are five trends described in this thesis: the influence of the new technologies of the second generation more social web (Web 2.0) on the products and tools that are part of the ECM systems; the effort to integrate the unstructured data of ECM systems with data from Business Intelligence (BI) systems to ensure better tools to support the strategic resolutions in the enterprise; the use of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model as a cheaper and more accessible alternative for the distribution of ECM solutions; the growth in preference of commercial open-source ECM solutions as a competitive and financially accessible alternative; and finally, the CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) specification as a proposed standard, that includes a set of web services to ensure interoperability and access to content repositories independent of the used system. At the end there is a description of how each trend reflects on concrete solutions in the ECM market