What is Document Management?

Document Management is the process of managing documents.

This may involve an integrated system which entails creation, review, sharing, storage, electronic tracking and retrieval, distribution, analysis, communication, administration and even destruction of digitized images of paper documents and other forms of information.

A document management system makes it possible to store data, information and documents electronically. An Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) offers ease in management of all your documents, scanned images etc, through software and hardware.

Quite a number of companies now provide a range of document and information management products and services, suited for a company, group, or organization of virtually any size, from commercial enterprises to government departments.

A Document Management System usually includes the following components:

Imaging : the scanning of paper documents.

Indexing : categorizing documents using appropriate tags or keywords.

Storage : creating electronic versions of the documents in a database, typically in image form, but possibly including an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) version to allow for search of document text.

Conversion : converting documents from one electronic format to another (e.g. Microsoft Word to PDF).

Retrieval : retrieving documents in a simple method if necessary.

Destruction : purging or destruction of documents if necessary.