Despite the promise of new technologies, effective enterprise content management feels more elusive than ever for a lot of companies. Part of the challenge is that there is simply more content produced than there used to be.

While organizations still have huge quantities of documents, employees are embracing new ways to record and share information which is everything from wikis and social media to websites and videos.

Enterprise search is the practice of making content from multiple enterprise sources such as databases and intranets, searchable to a defined audience. "Enterprise search" is also used to describe the software of search information within an enterprise.

Enterprise search systems index data and documents from a variety of sources such as file systems, intranets, content management systems, e-mail, and databases. Many enterprise search systems integrate structured and unstructured data in their collections. Enterprise search systems also use access controls to enforce a security policy on their users.

Electronic discovery or ediscovery refers to discovery in legal proceedings such as litigation or government investigations where the information sought is in electronic format. The ever increasing amount of litigation, greater volumes of data and a move toward adding in-house e-discovery capabilities require strong tools for ediscovery.

Data is scattered throughout companies and has become progressively more difficult to manage. Companies are dealing with big data, data in shared repositories such as Box.com, data on mobile devices, etc.

Many issues affect knowledge management. The five most important are big data, cybersecurity, mobility, social analytics, and customer engagement.

The availability of big data has opened many options for understanding everything from customer preferences to medical outcomes.

Information access and retrieval within most organizations is a work in progress. There might be a general search system for marketing information, and probably one or more database search systems.

The larger the organization, the greater the number of information retrieval systems. Each laptop and mobile device has a search system. Mobile phone apps sport their own search systems. The lawyers in an organization may have different search systems for specific types of legal matters. The enterprise resource planning (ERP) users have a search system. When it comes to enterprise search, there are many silos.