Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the category of software that helps you manage all of the unstructured information - or content - in your enterprise. This information exists in many digital forms: text documents, engineering drawings, XML, still images, audio and video files, and many other file types and formats. ECM helps you create content with common desktop applications and easy-to-use content authoring templates. It can also capture and incorporate existing content from a variety of sources.

ECM manages this content and the content from other enterprise applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and enterprise portals. It adds intelligence by creating categorization schema, metadata, and tags that make search and retrieval faster and more efficient. ECM also manages the review, revision, and approval process for any piece of content according to user-defined business rules - often termed Business Process Management (BPM). It has inherent workflow and lifecycle management capabilities to help achieve this.