BANGALORE, INDIA: In the late 70's, enterprises needed a solution to manage their deluge of paper documents like invoices, faxes, photos, etc. Their wish wasn't fulfilled until the early 80's, when vendors introduced different kinds of document management solutions. Immediately after that the computers market exploded and brought with it electronic documents to manage as well.

The early Electronic Document Management (EDM) solutions used to manage file types that were specific to individual organizations. Later, as more official documents turned electronic, support for managing higher number of file types had to be introduced. These solutions could handle both electronic as well as paper documents. The next logical evolution was to have the ability to track the movement of documents. That's where modern day document managemnet solutions stand. Apart from managing documents, they can also do work flow, collaboration, auditing and security

Why document management?

In the traditional system, we used to have a full fledged department to take care of all documents. And is still being used by some organizations like banks. But for organizations which are mostly into IT doesn't really need to maintain paper documents except for some special cases. There were number of limitations in the traditional system, like it required space to keep those documents which again gets full over time. Apart from these, it required dedicated human resource and huge time to maintain the same.

Moreover, search for a specific document was cumbersome at times. There were security issues as well. Similar is the case with electronic document. Everyone uploads file on the common shared folder and after a period of time, the number of files becomes so huge that managing them becomes tedious. There can be redundancy, security and confidentiality issues as well.

An electronic document management can solve all such problems. For example, you can save a lot on space and human resource, which alsol provides better customer service. Moreover, you can have access to any authorized document 24x7. Due to organized management policy it will be easier to access any document and save lots of time. You can play safe with your data as it maintains all the versions of a single document. And any change made to a particular document can be tracked down, for instance, at which level a particular change is made. Besides, it also provides disaster recovery options.

Technologies in DM
Even simple document management software will keep all information that is required to get things working. Such metadata includes creation date of the document, date the document was stored and name of the person who stored it. All DM solutions do indexing i.e. tracking documents.

Some complex DM systems can integrate with other applications, like MS Office 2007. Once you have created your document you can directly upload it from MS office. Moreover you can modify the document live in the DM solution and then save it. For example, Google Docs, which provides you DM and at the same time applications through which you can modify or create documents.

Some proprietary DM software let you directly scan documents with the help of OCR. It can convert the scanned image to machine readable text. Not all but most document management solutions also provide workflow management and collaboration option like internal email system, rule based workflow etc. Now let's implement couple of document solution and explore some interesting features in them. Some standards on document management are (src: wikipedia)

• ISO 2709:1996-- Format for information exchange
• ISO 15836:2003- The Dublin Core metadata element set
• ISO 21127:2006-- A reference ontology for the interchange of cultural heritage information
• ISO 23950:1998-- Information retrieval (Z39.50) -- Application service definition and protocol specification.
• ISO/CD 10244-- Business process/workflow baselining and analysis associated with EDMS technologies