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Document Management
Digital document management revolutionizes the management of information and provides the ability to rapidly find, retrieve and share all the documents in your repository. This section will provide you with more information on what digital document management is and how it works, essential components of an enterprise-level digital document management system and the technical issues you must consider.
Usability
One of the most important factors in how successful a document management system will be is how easy it is to use. Usability is critical in encouraging rapid staff acceptance. A system will only be widely used if it is simple to capture documents, organize and find them. The best systems are user-friendly and flexible enough to adapt to the way people already work within an organization, rather than forcing them to change their preferred way of working.
Capture
For a document management system to enhance business operations, it must accommodate all the types of documents—paper, electronic, fax, audio and video, to name a few—that are part of an organization's processes and procedures. It should also enable batch processing of documents and forms for organizations that rely on high-volume processing as a part of business operations.
There are three ways to bring files into a digital document management system:
- Scanning or imaging (for paper files).
- Importing (for archiving electronic documents such as e-mail, spreadsheets, faxes, audio and video).
- Conversion (for creating unalterable images of electronic documents).
Indexing and Retrieval
In a recent survey, three-fourths of executives said that information is their organization's most important asset. Ensuring that this information is readily available to the employees who need it is one of the major challenges for today's executives.
A full-featured document management system makes it easy to find what you want when you want it. Retrieval of relevant documents should be fast, easy and efficient, with multiple methods of indexing (categorizing) information.
There are three primary ways of indexing files in a document management system:
- Full-text indexing, or indexing every word in a document.
- Template fields, or indexing through keyword categories of documents.
- Folder/file structure, or indexing by associated document groups.
Retrieval is where the quality of the indexing system is most evident. Some document management systems let users search only by indexed keywords, which requires a person to know how the document was categorized and what template fields were assigned to it. A powerful indexing system will make it possible for users to find any document based on what they know, even if that amounts to no more than a word or phrase within the document.
Storage and Archiving
Once documents are brought into the document management system, they must be reliably stored. Document management storage systems must be able to accommodate changing technologies and an organization's future growth.
Concerns about future readability of documents are records make many organizations hesitant to implement a document management system. With rapid changes in the technology sector, it is hard to predict what applications and hardware will be current five or ten years from now. However, the need for faster retrieval and improved records management means that most organizations cannot wait to implement solutions.
To address these concerns, document management systems should use non-proprietary image and text formats. Documents created and saved with obsolete versions of a program can be difficult or even impossible to read. Using proprietary formats for documents means that converting files from old versions can be a frustrating and expensive task. Storing document images or text files in a proprietary format may leave your organization dependent on the future success or failure of another company.
