Document management : A dream of paperless office


What is document management: When we think about "Document Management" we usually see a picture of paperless office. It is not an easy task to make an office paperless due to several existing problems based on Industrial needs. Even it is very much difficult to make a shop paperless using document management. Document management is about to manage the document in such a way so that it can be within our reach whenever needed in the desired form without wasting extra time and space. Since computer is a wonderful device and much useful in document management.

How document management work: There are several software which can help in document management. There are some terms which is useful to know for document management.

Electronic Document Capture (EDC) for document management.

Scanning, Text recognition & image conversion are comes under this category in document management. In this we simply convert paper media to soft copy. This is a very useful activity to do document management. By this our reach towards any document becomes more easy and cost effective. Take an example if you want to search a particular paper from a bunch of thousand papers. Using soft copy it is very easy and cost effective. If you want to give a copy to any other person then too it is very quick and economic.

Optical character recognition (OCR) for document management.

Just what will happen if your document is a normal document typed using a simple typewriter font. Optical character recognition plays a role to understand what is it exactly. Simply saying it recognize the characters printed on a physical media you can say a normal paper.

Electronic document management system (EDMS) for document management.

If you have a big collection of electronically created documents then electronic document management system is the basic need to correctly locate and display the required document. There may be several requirements to manage the electronically created documents with respect to searching and some other similar operations. There may be a need to maintain summary of all documents and different versions of source documents.

Electronic Record management system (ERMS) for document management.

There are several application where there is need to maintain the records in highly ordered way like payrolls & patient records. This system manage the documents in such a way so that these are easily accessible effectively.

Web content management (WCM) for document management.

This system is used to manage websites in a very systematic way. There are so many web documents which needs to store and publish to any website defining several permissions. This document management system take care of all such needs.

Workflow management (WFM) for document management.

If a document is created after passing several highly ordered steps then this work flow management system is used for document management. We use very efficient software for this document management. Every document should be within reach of correct person timely and that's done by this type of document management.

Knowledge Management (KM) for document management.

FAQ are the good example of this type of document management. Any information should be communicated to relevant person easily. This is very useful in industries where this type of document management system fills the bridge of communication gap.

These are general terms which are used for document management. Now it may be very easy to decide which type of document management is best suited for any need. Afterwards you can search and implement the particular document management.

Author is an engineer and is running a website http://engineering-updates.com, you can reproduce this article if all the link are alive.