Content collaboration tools provide an easy way for employees to use and share content both inside and outside the organizations. Since these tools can be used to collaborate with customers, partners and suppliers, they often provide rich security and privacy controls. Today, much of this functionality also can be found in other tools such as cloud office platforms, workstream collaboration platforms, content services platforms and content services applications. Functional differentiators in dedicated CCTs are difficult to identify.
Content services platforms (CSPs) are foundational for managing and utilizing content within an organization. CSP technologies enable employees to retrieve and work with content in a modern and seamless way across devices and organizational boundaries. Core CSP functionalities include content capture, creation, consolidation, processing and retention to support personal, team, departmental and enterprise business operations.
Gartner defines document management as the tools and practices used to capture, store, process, and access documents and content in support of personal, team and enterprise needs. It is used for a wide range of collaborative and operational purposes, enabling the digital workplace, content collaboration, content-centric processes, content services for enterprise applications and content governance. Gartner estimates that 70% to 80% of enterprise information is unstructured, posing a significant challenge for organizations that must unlock the potential and mitigate the risks of content. Document management tools are critical to enterprise application strategies that need to support unstructured information or content.
Electronic signatures are a digital representation of an individual’s agreement that is intended to be the equivalent of a “wet” signature. Electronic signatures encompass a set of methods that can be applied to a digital document to capture intent to sign, and consent to sign electronically. They do this by electronically gathering metadata related to all signing events, and creating an audit trail that is cryptographically sealed to ensure document authenticity, nonrepudiation and integrity of the electronically signed document. This audit trail may also contain various supporting evidence of the individuals signing the document, such as names, email addresses, identity proofing and authentication steps. Evidence details may vary with each product, but the audit trail provides evidence to support the legal value of the document. A digital signature (as it relates to document signing) is a type of electronic signature that, in addition to the requirements of an electronic signature, also requires that each signer sign the document with a digital certificate that is explicitly issued to them.