This last piece is what is critical, and also what is very difficult, about good content management. The automated features of capturing when (and who) changed files can be handled fairly trivially by automated systems - that instead of replacing files, version control them in some manner and manage keeping track of what is the current version to be used). What is difficult is getting people to document WHY they make a change.

As well, ideally a tool will help track a set of related changes. Early change management systems would handle single files at a time - check it out, make a change, check it back in. However, many types of content today are not a single "file" but a series of related items - an HTML page can have dozens of files that make it up.

A separate, and very challenging aspect for many types of content management is to track changes that are not to a single file (word document, HTML file, part of the source code for an application etc) - but are rather changes within a database (or databases) - here it can be very, very difficult to build such systems to track changes over time - it requires a vastly more complex type of database technology than most companies and applications employ today.

Another related aspect of Enterprise Content Management is to keep track of the state of things when a change happens. Specifically for many types of content it is important to capture information about the state of systems (or people) when changes are made.

Consider in a non-technical capacity, it might be very valuable (and important) to keep track of what jobs people had when they made given changes - it might further be useful and important to know who worked in what office and who reported to whom. For that matter, who within a set of change reports worked for the firm and who worked for an outside consultant, or was a summer intern etc.

To bring intelectual property to this, you might then further want to associate people with specific employment contracts and terms underwhich they have (or have not) assigned intellectual property to the firm...

i.e. Enterprise Content Management's toughest challenges is tracking state and getting people to add to the information that is needed to after the fact understand the set of changes.

Shannon

For each