What is Document Management (DMS)?

What is Document Management (DMS)?

Document management, often referred to as Document Management Systems (DMS), is the use of a computer system and software to store, manage and track electronic documents and electronic images of paper-based information captured through the use of a document scanner.

Document management is how your organization stores, manages, and tracks its electronic documents.

According to ISO 12651-2, a document is “recorded information or object which can be treated as a unit.” While this sounds a little complicated, it is quite simply what you have been using to create, distribute and use for years.

Now, we can define document management as the software that controls and organizes documents throughout an organization. It incorporates document and content capture, workflow, document repositories, COLD/ERM, and output systems, and information retrieval systems.  Also, the processes used to track, store, and control documents.

Attention Visual Learners: Click here to SEE how this term relates to Intelligent Information Management (IIM).

Document management is one of the precursor technologies to content management, and not all that long ago was available solely on a standalone basis like its imaging, workflow, and archiving brethren. It provides some of the most basic functionality to content management, imposing controls and management capabilities onto otherwise “dumb” documents. This makes it so that when you have documents and need to use them, you are able to do so. Some of the key features in document management include:

• Check-in/check-out and locking, to coordinate the simultaneous editing of a document, so one person’s changes don’t overwrite another’s
• Version control, so tabs can be kept on how the current document came to be and how it differs from the versions that came before
• Roll-back, to “activate” a prior version in case of an error or premature release
• Audit trail, to permit the reconstruction of who did what to a document during the course of its life in the system
• Annotation and Stamps,

Document management eventually was subsumed into content management in no small measure because there is more information available to us today than ever before, and most of it is not being created by us.  Thanks to the mainstreaming of a whole range of sources like the Web, thumb drives, smartphones, etc., the need has accelerated to deal with information of all kinds: not just in terms of more media types like text vs. images vs. voice files, but also in terms of how structured – and thus how readily managed – it all is.

Document management systems today range in size and scope from small, standalone systems to large scale enterprise-wide configurations serving a global audience.  Many document management systems provide a means to incorporate standard physical document filing practices electronically. These include:

• Storage location
• Security and access control
• Version control
• Audit trails
• Check-in/check-out and document lockdown.

Document management, while still recognized and utilized independently, it is also a common component found within an Enterprise Content Management environment.