Introduction to Document Management

Document management is a frequently overused set of words defined by many technology vendors to mean everything from making sure that no two people use the same file name, to managing large repositories of millions of documents for the purpose of supporting a series of specific document driven business processes.  Its hard to know what the various vendors mean by "document management" without further time consuming analysis.  The point of this article is to cut through that noise and provide you with some of the basics that will help make your solution research here on techinfocenter.com more fruitful.

What is a Document?

These days its hard to tell. Emails, mail attachments, paper documents, web pages, forms, film, microfiche, all of it is a document of some kind. The best way to segment them all is to determine whether they are digital, or analog.  Digital documents are emails, word processing documents, etc.  Analog documents are either paper, or film.  Some vendors promoting their document management solution refer to either one or the other, and or refer only to particular types of each.  So for example, Microsoft when referring to document management for SharePoint is mostly talking about documents created with Microsoft Office as opposed to any type of document.  Other vendors and solutions providers refer to either all digital but no analog, or all analog but no digital.  Some even mean using computer software to "manage" content kept in paper file cabinets or film or microfilm kept in storage without actually moving the content into the computer system.  All of it has validity, but it can also get confusing quickly.

In order to simplify keep the following in mind:

• Electronic document management - does the vendor refer to ALL kinds of electronic documents regardless of type or application suffix, or are they primarily talking about only one kind?
• Physical Document Management - is the vendor talking about making physical objects digital, or managing them in place (where they stay on paper of film) and what they tell you during the retrieval process is where you can go to find it in order to actually read it?
• Comprehensive Document Management - all kinds of documents, all physical documents readable on the screen.

While you might still have to make these kinds of distinctions in your research, in general terms when we make reference to document management here on Techinfocenter.com and also on Kollabria.com, we are talking about software that installs on your computer system, that all physical documents are digitized and migrated into your computing environment, and that all kinds of electronic file types can be accommodated.

This paper to digital migration is generally referred to as document capture and you can learn more about that here as well in an upcoming educational brief.

What is Document Management?

So while there is confusion about just which kind of document the software "manages", the word "management" is equally vague.  What kind of management, and for what business purpose are the question you should ask yourself.   Since its your business and your requirements, very little except for the basic elements of "management" come out of the box.  The rest is typically a one time configuration effort.

Furthermore, you can not assume that that every vendor means the same thing by the word "management", and that their definition meets all of your needs, or can be extended to meet your needs.  

At the most generic level all document management solutions have the ability to let you track "versions" of electronic files in order to avoid confusion about which particular file in your server directory is the newest version, and they also let you "check" documents "in and out" in order to avoid having multiple people work on the same document at the same time and accidentally overwriting each others changes. Others do little more than to provide you with an electronic file cabinet with little to no "librarianship" or intelligence.

Higher levels of document management software features involve the ability to group various documents together in virtual folders, hiding or "redacting" document content contained inside the document itself depending on who is looking at it, as well as a wide variety of security, document grouping, distribution controls, and staging the management of documents according to the business process requirements.

Recommended Document Management Software Vendors

In the column on the right you will find a short list of recommended vendors each of which has some unique products that provide a wide range of document management capabilities.

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