Document management system

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A document management system (DMS) is a computer system (or set of computer programs) used to track and store electronic documents and/or images of paper documents. The term has some overlap with the concepts of Content Management Systems and is often viewed as a component of Enterprise Content Management Systems and related to Digital Asset Management.

1 Overview
2 History
3 Components
4 References
5 See also

[edit] Overview

Whether formalized or informal, based on a computer system or performed manually, most offices need some sort of system to address the following questions related to managing documents:

Storage: Where will we keep our documents? How much can we spend to store them?
Retrieval: How can people find needed documents? How much time can be spent looking for them?
Filing: How do we organize our documents? How do we ensure documents are filed appropriately?
Security: How do we protect against the loss, tampering or destruction of documents? How do we keep sensitive information hidden?
Archival: How do we ensure the readability of documents in the future? How can we protect our documents against fires, floods or natural disasters?
Retention: How do we decide what documents to retain? How long should they be kept? How do we remove them afterwards?
Distribution: How do we get documents into the hands of people who need them? How much can we spend to distribute the documents?
Workflow: If documents need to pass from one person to another, what are the rules for how their work should flow?
Creation: If more than one person is involved in creating a document, how will the people collaborate?

In order to provide more efficient and cost effective answers to these questions, a document management system generally contains various components and features as described below.

Document management systems have some overlap with Content Management Systems, Enterprise Content Management Systems, Digital Asset Management, Document imaging, Workflow systems and Records Management systems.

[edit] History

Beginning in the 1980s, a number of vendors began developing systems to manage paper-based documents. Initially designed to offer mainly document imaging-level capture, storage, indexing and retrieval capabilities, the applications grew to encompass electronic documents, collaboration tools, security, and auditing capabilities...

[edit] Components

Document management systems commonly provide storage, versioning, metadata, security, as well as indexing and retrieval capabilities. Here is a description of these components.

Metadata
- Metadata is typically stored for each document. Metadata may, for example, include the date the document was stored and the identity of the user storing it. The DMS may also extract metadata from the document automatically or prompt the user to add metadata. Some systems also use optical character recognition on scanned images, or perform text extraction on electronic documents. The resulting extracted text can be used to assist users in locating documents by identifying probable keywords or providing for full text search capability, or can be used on its own. Extracted text can also be stored as a component of metadata, stored with the image, or separately as a source for searching document collections.
Integration
- Many document management systems attempt to integrate document management directly into other applications, so that users may retrieve existing documents directly from the document management system repository, make changes, and save the changed document back to the repository as a new version, all without leaving the application. Such integration is commonly available for office suites and e-mail software. Integration often uses open standards such as ODMA, LDAP, WebDAV and SOAP to allow integration with other software and compliance with internal controls.^{[citation needed]}
Capture
- Images of paper documents using scanners or multifunction printers.
Indexing
- Track electronic documents. Indexing may be as simple as keeping track of unique document identifiers; but often it takes a more complex form, providing classification through the documents' metadata or even through word indexes extracted from the documents' contents. Indexing exists mainly to support retrieval.
Storage
- Store electronic documents
Retrieval
- Retrieve the electronic documents from the storage. Although the notion of retrieving a particular document is simple, retrieval in the electronic context can be quite complex and powerful. Simple retrieval of individual documents can be supported by allowing the user to specify the unique document identifier, and having the system use the basic index (or a non-indexed query on its data store) to retrieve the document. More flexible retrieval allows the user to specify partial search terms involving the document identifer and/or parts of the expected metadata. This would typically return a list of documents which match the user's search terms. Some systems provide the capability to specify a Boolean expression containing multiple keywords or example phrases expected to exist within the documents' contents. The retrieval for this kind of query may be supported by previously-built indexes, or may perform more time-consuming searches through the documents' contents to return a list of the potentially relevant documents. See also Document retrieval.
Distribution
Security
Workflow
Collaboration
- Versioning