Electronic Document Management has been widely accepted as the practice of creating and storing documents. What lacks common acceptance is the need to retrieve, archive and sort documents as per requirements. With real estate costs climbing feverishly, and businesses process becoming more and more complex and demanding, the need to implement an integrated electronic document management

system is growing by the day. Realizing this opportunity, several global software vendors have come up with their document management products to facilitate this process and more and more organizations are implementing this system in today’s world.

It I important to understand what exactly electronic document management refers to and why is it so important to organizations, small or big. Electronic Document Management System refers to a system whereby documents are created, modified, stored, distributed, secured and retrieved with the help of software tools.

An organization must ponder several times and answer several questions before it goes about implementing a document management system. Some of the questions that must be asked can be:-

(1) Are your documents uniformly marked and stored for “finger-pointed” retrieval.
(2) Can you easily gather related documents that are physically distributed at different places.
(3) Can your personnel easily locate documents created or modified by others within the organization, regardless of the format and method of creation of the documents.
(4) How long does it take to locate the desired bunch of documents.
(5) Can you find a specific type of similar documents over a date range quickly and effectively.
(6) Can you track back the person responsible for handling any particular document.

Answering the above questions can easily help you take a decision. Also, to arrive at a conclusion, one must keep in mind the following characteristics of a suitable document management system.

(a) Should convert your office into a paper-less office by electronically keeping track of all documents.
(b) Should seamlessly integrate with your existing manual document management methods.
(c) Should help your business grow faster by ensuring fast and accurate availability of information.
(d) Should help you analyze the efficiency of co-workers by keeping track of documentation work allotted to them.

india based technology expert specialising in web marketing and 3d modeling

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