Document Management

Document Management Process

Document management practices allow records to be stored, maintained and accessed electronically which reduces the redundancy and tedious activity of retrieving paper records. Document Management process in itself is a close knit process with various elements making up the units of the process.

What are the elements of the Document Management Process?

The exercise of document management is triggered through a process called Capture. Paper records are scanned to a digital format by the use of an OCR Software. Once the digital format of the paper record is ready, the objective of the Document Management process is to ensure that the electronic record is stored and maintained in such a manner that the objectives of a Document Management exercise are met.

The following elements are key ingredients of the Document Management process:

• Metadata - Metadata is required for each document which is stored electronically. This includes the storage date and the user identification who has initiated the storage of the document. This metadata can be manually entered by the user or can be automated with the use of an OCR software. This Metadata acts as an indexing tool for retrieval of the records.
  
  
• Integration - Document management can be done through various applications. The objective of integration is to ensure that document can be shared across different applications. As an example, application A wishes to share certain documents with application B which can be achieved by integration. Many open source tools like ODMA, SOAP facilitate the exercise of integration.
  
  
• Indexing - The process of tracking electronic documents is known as Indexing. Indexing can be done by simply keeping a track of document identifiers which are unique to each document. If the case of document tracking is complex, a much more complicated tracking algorithm would need to be used which tracks documents through the metadata record of the documents.
  
  
• Retrieval - This is the most powerful feature of a DMS. One can retrieve any stored electronic record stored in a DMS server by mentioning either the unique document identifier or by mentioning a series of Boolean expressions, with the latter being used in complex cases. The user who uses a Document Management System may get a list of results for the search criteria specified by him.

Many other components like Indexing, Storage contribute effectively to the end to end process of Document Management to enable the Document Management System attain its objectives.

Techniques like Distribution, Collaboration, Versioning form an integral part of any Document Management process. These techniques along with the Security concept allows users to add many features to their Document Storage and Retrieval process.