In order to support internal and external information demands, enterprises have to manage a multitude of heterogeneous information resources, typically in the guise of structured or unstructured documents. Enterprise content management systems (ECMS) are currently state of the art for storing and retrieving weakly structured documents. A challenge such systems are often faced with is the management of different document life cycles which can be determined by a variety of influence factors. In this paper we discuss some of these factors and propose the use of generic services to flexibly manage document life cycles in a platform independent manner, considering their inherent advantages and disadvantages.