Enterprise Content Integration

Enterprise content integration (ECI) is a marketing buzzword for middleware software technology, often used within large organizations, that connects together various types of computer systems that manage documents and digital content. ECI systems often work in tandem with other technologies such as enterprise content management, document management, groupware, and records management. It takes a decentralized approach in order to manage content from various resources. ECI implementations exist on a tier above the organization’s existing software and provide wide-ranging search, indexing, and access functions.

ECI systems, in particular, and Unified Information Access systems in general, attempt to address the growing trend of the recognition that so-called “unstructured content,” such as a series of documents, can be important and can contribute to business development. Their other important function lies in their ability to increase the efficiency which with organizations can retrieve data by providing a single channel to access a wide variety of storage locations.

Enterprise content integration aims to answer a number of needs in today's organizations:

ECI functions through the use of a metadata catalog that contains records regarding data throughout the enterprise in order to enable users to seek, browse, locate, and retrieve the necessary information. ECI metadata catalogs are able to collect data from a wide array of sources, including digital asset management systems, file and web servers, and individual users’ PCs. Vendors sometimes refer to this sort of decentralized content management as a virtual repository or a virtual file system.

In addition to gathering data for the metadata catalog, some ECI systems are able to connect to the resources offered by a computer system directly through an interface such as an API. These types of connections are often referred to as adapters, connectors, or content bridges by ECI vendors.

...
Wikipedia