More than ever before, companies have become concerned about managing their content. By content, I am referring to information. A great deal of information in an average organisation is unstructured. Office documents, paper documents, images, computer generated reports, email and web content for example.

In the past, effectively managing document and file storage was simply a matter of having an efficient filing system and plenty of storage shelves.

Information Technology has caused a massive increase in the volume of data and organisations need to put strategies in place to keep control of this information so that it can be made best use of. Companies also need to make sure the information is not a liability to them and they can reduce the cost of storing it as much as possible.

Quite a lot of the unstructured content is what is termed ‘fixed content’ – information in its final form. The content will not change, but information about the content might change during its life span. Other content types are created as dynamic content objects, office documents and web content for instance. This simply means that they will be changed or modified over a period of time. However, eventually, much dynamic content becomes fixed as well.

Since most unstructured information is fixed or will become fixed, it seems logical for a company to seek storage solutions for fixed rather than dynamic content. Fixed content management solutions can deal with the costs and challenges associated with distribution and access to data using paper-based or microfiche methods.