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.
The ECA market consists of vendors offering a discrete application, well-defined module, or cohesive set of capabilities that enables people in “communicator” roles to plan, create, coordinate, and distribute internal communications across the workforce or to specific audiences. ECAs include analytics that measure interactions and effectiveness of communications across content, channels, devices, campaigns and feedback loops to assess business and employee value.
Enterprise social networking applications facilitate, capture and organize open conversations and information sharing between individual workers and groups within an organization. In addition to capabilities that support conversations and information sharing, they can keep track of the network of relationships between participants (via social graphs), in order to deliver a personalized stream of updates about events or conversations to individuals (via news feeds and activity streams). These applications help people find out about each other, have discussions, share information and generally interact. Interaction occurs either at a one-to-one level, or in groups, teams, communities and networks, and in the context of structured or unstructured business activities.
Gartner defines an intranet packaged solution (IPS) as a general-purpose, unified, multichannel software product available via public or private cloud deployment. It delivers a versatile range of business-to-employee digital experiences, including internal communications, community and social interaction, knowledge bases, self-service functions, and access to training and business applications. IPS products utilize web and mobile channels to support these experiences, while also offering native support for other channels such as email, AI assistants, digital signage, in-app plugins and messaging apps. The web channel may consist of a single site or a collection of IPS-created sites, encompassing various site types such as portals, “front doors” or hubs. An IPS is typically sponsored by HR and internal communication leaders as part of digital workplace initiatives. An IPS aims to provide consistent digital experiences that help employees perform their best work, connect to the organization’s culture, align with the organization’s strategy, and advance their skills and expertise. It facilitates the creation, deployment, management and evolution of multichannel communications, serving as a common resource for information and knowledge sharing across the organization. Deploying an IPS enhances the effectiveness and efficiency of intranet projects.
The market for social software in the workplace includes software products that support people working together in teams, communities or networks. These products can be tailored to support a variety of collaborative activities. Buyers are looking for virtual environments that can engage participants to create, organize and share information, and encourage them to find, connect and interact with each other. Business use of these products ranges from project coordination within small teams or homogeneous groups, to information exchange between employees across an entire organization.