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What is Electronic Document Management?Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS) provide an organization with the tools to create, manage, control, and distribute electronic documents. Before going further, this would be a good place to define what we mean by "document." In the context of EDMS (or "the EDMS space" to use the latest buzz terminology), a document is essentially a file. A file, in this usage, is an electronic, digital container for information. A document may be a word processing file, or it may be a graphic image, or any other discrete, identifiable information unit that can exist within a computer system. Traditionally, operating systems such as DOS and Windows have failed to offer the tools and resources necessary for managing documents. The principal case in point is the paltry 8+3 file naming constraints enforced by DOS and Windows 3.x. Not until Windows 95 did the Microsoft+Intel platform offer the possibility of long, "descriptive" file names. Understandably, the tools used to create and distribute files—word processors, spreadsheets, graphics programs, and the like—have concentrated on their core functionality, leaving document management to the operating system. Which meant, essentially, leaving it out in the cold. Firms, such as law firms, that create huge numbers of documents, and that have invested their intellectual capital in the content of these documents, have traditionally turned to document management software, like WORLDOX, to overcome this deficit. As more "corporate memory" is captured in electronic documents, more firms are recognizing the need for a document management system. Consider that most department managers have a much better idea of the contents of their supply cabinets than they do of the electronic documents generated by their group. We're talking about the critical intellectual assets upon which their business relies. Clearly, there is a problem here.
Do You Need Document Management?Before answering this question, try a quick round of 21 Questions....
If you are not fully satisfied with your answers to these questions, then it's time for document management. It's time for WORLDOX! What Can Document Management Do For You?First of all, document management is not for your documents, it's for your users and your business objectives. Document Management puts you in control of the knowledge institutionalized within your organization. Studies suggest that 80 percent of a company's "knowledge" is stored as non-structured data, such as documents. A document management system is the means to impart structure, organization, and accessibility to this knowledge store.Document management is a broad discipline that offers a variety of services and features that can be addressed within the following categories:
Library ServicesLibrary services comprise the core set of document management functionality. It is a broad term that encompasses saving, cataloging, and retrieving files. When you use a document manager to create a file, you generally are required to fill in a profile card. The thumbnail image below shows the WORLDOX Save As window for a profile group we use to manage our technical publications here at World Software.
The
profile card includes spaces to fill
in information that will help users
manage and retrieve the document. This
includes custom fields, a descriptive
file name, security attributes, and
additional file attributes which are
filled in automatically, such as Author,
file creation/update date, document
number, path location, and so on. Network SupportNetwork support provides the tools necessary to work with network drives and resources from the document manager in a way that is transparent to end-users. Network support, for example, provides users with single-point-of-access document retrieval, no matter how dispersed the documents may actually be on the network. It also means providing the system administrator with a straightforward methodology to integrate the document manager with the network. WORLDOX also includes a mirroring facility which copies down files to the user's local hard drive as they are accessed from the network. This ensures that in the event of network failure, users can continue to work. When the connection to the network is restored, WORLDOX automatically re-synchronizes the mirror files with their network counterparts. Document SecurityDocument security places the DMS at the focal point of access and permissioning to the document repository. Document security involves documents, users, and groups of users. The DMS assigns rights and permissions to documents based on individual users, groups of users, and the roles in which users serve within the organization. Full Text RetrievalA true document manager must provide several avenues that users can go down in order to find information. Full text retrieval is a critical route of access to information that cannot easily be categorized or represented within the document profiling structure. Full text searching gives users wide-open access to their documents by framing searches based on concepts rather than categories. Full text retrieval is a two-part process. In the first part, a text indexing engine extracts each word from all the documents cleared for searching. This information is used to construct an index to the documents.
The second part of full text searching is the actual search, wherein users specify criteria—words, combinations of word, phrases, expressions, etc.—that are searched against the index. Each document matching the search terms is returned as a "hit." WORLDOX includes integrated file viewers that highlight each occurrence of a search term in the returned documents. Document ViewersAn enterprise-level document management system is called upon to manage more than one type of file. In a typical installation, the DMS is managing word processing files—often generated by more than one word processing program—spreadsheets, data tables, image files of various formats, project files, HTML files, and so on. As these files, or objects, are under the control of the DMS, it must provide a means to view these files. WORLDOX, for example, includes files viewers for more than 150 file formats. The file viewers are integrated into the program such that text "hits" found during searches are highlighted in the viewers. WORLDOX viewers also offer cut-and-paste to the Windows Clipboard, and can serve to display output from various operations, such as comparing two documents.
ArchivingArchiving is a means to move dated or unused files off the main storage medium to secondary storage. The DMS must ensure that users can still search for information in the archived files and, if desired information is contained in an archive, that there is a ready means to restore it. WORLDOX allows site administrators to set "triggers" in the document profiles that enable automated archiving. For example, it may be desirable to set company memoranda to be archived automatically after say, 90 days. Other approaches include archiving all the files for a closed matter, or on any other criterion by which documents are managed. Version ControlA document version is an instance, or draft, of a document saved as a subsequent revision of a prior draft. By creating discrete versions of a document, it is possible to retrace its evolution. Document versions generally run linearly, such that version 2 follows version 1, version 3 follows version 2, and so on. Some document managers, including WORLDOX, enable users to create branches, or sub-versions. When using sub-versions, version 1 (called a major version) may be followed by version 1.1 (a minor version), then by version 1.2. At some point a new major version, version 2, is created. A DMS that supports version control must allow users to spawn new versions, within accepted guidelines, to return to prior versions, and to offer tools to work with versioned documents, such as redline comparison. Document HistorySince documents are so vital to the success of any information-based organization, it is essential to maintain a historical activity record associated with each document. Document histories, also known as audit trails, provide this within the framework of the DMS. A document history report in WORLDOX, for example, describes each action in the life of a document including who performed the action, its date and time, and the nature of the action itself. Manager-level users in WORLDOX can view a history report on any document managed by the DMS.
Access ControlAs networks have become commonplace, so too has collaborative authoring and editing of documents. A document management system must provide some way for multiple authors to coordinate activities across one or more documents. One of the primary means for doing so is to implement a document check-in/check-out regimen. When a user checks out a document, he or she has the option of "locking" it so that other users can view the document, but cannot make any changes to it. This prevents problems that may arise when several workers attempt to edit the same document at the same time. With check-out, only one worker may edit a file. When finished, the worker checks the document back in through the DMS, making it available to other users once again.
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