Valuable information often roams wild in a midmarket company. Enterprise content management software can tame the data beast.

As a midmarket real estate company that owns and manages more than 500 shopping centers throughout the U.S., Puerto Rico and Brazil, Developers Diversified Realty Corp. relies on a lot of documents to conduct its business. "A huge majority of our information comes from documents," says Lorraine McGlone, vice president of IT at the Beachwood, Ohio-based company. "Leases with tenants, agreements with lenders, closing information -- all of those are in documents."

To get a handle on the volume of material, McGlone didn't implement a standalone document management application aimed primarily at centralizing documents along functional lines. Instead, she turned to an enterprise content management (ECM) system from Open Text Corp., a platform for interdepartmental workflow, data reuse as well as document centralization and document management.