Document Management

Document Management is a process by which documents can be handled in a way that the information can be shared, created, stored and organized appropriately and efficiently.

For many businesses, document management is used as a method that would help them in the organization and storage of documents, so that they can later find documents easily, when required. These organizations use a document management system, that can be created for the benefit of the company, according to the needs of each organization. These customized systems could then be fit into the document management process, to enhance the benefits of the process.

A document management system is a set of computer programs or a computer system. It can be utilized to store and track images of documents on paper or electronic documents. The concepts of a document management system overlaps with the approaches of content management systems. It is often seen as a constituent of enterprise content management system. It is generally related to document imaging, digital asset management, record management systems and workflow systems.

Setting up of a document management system involves the following three steps:

Step 1: Creation of a Document Management plan.

Step 2: Implementation of the plan designed.

Step 3: Following the plan, through.

A Document Management System is generally used by organizations to provide versioning, security, storage, metadata, retrieval capabilities and indexing. Some of these components have been discussed below:

Indexing: This helps in tracking of electronic documents. It may keep track of identifiers of unique documents. Indexing can be done of more complex documents, such as, providing classification through the metadata of documents', or through the word indexes that have been extracted from the contents of the documents'. The process mainly exists for retrieval support . However, it is essential for an index topology to be created, to ensure rapid retrieval.

Metadata: It is stored for individual documents, typically. It may include the date of storage of the document, and also the identity of the user, who had stored it. A Document Management System may also extract the metadata, automatically, from the document, or can even prompt the user to opt for metadata. Some organizations use the system for optical character recognition on images that have been scanned or to perform extraction of text on documents that are electronic.

Integration: Most of the DMS's attempt to incorporate document management right into other applications. This is done to help the users in retrieving documents that are already existing directly from the repository of the document management system, make alterations, and save the document with the changes as a new file, all without having to leave the application. This system is extremely suitable in the case of e-mails or groupware/collaboration software.

However, most of the businesses still operate with a mixed version of electronic data and paper. With document management, information is channelized in a more effective and meaningful way because it incorporates paper documents as well.

Document Management |