Chapter 11: Document Management Systems

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Overview

Information is a source of learning. But unless it is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a format for decision making, it is a burden, not a benefit. —William Pollard

The demands for improved document management have increased with the increasing volume and diversity of documentation produced. The development of technologies that make wide use of digital documents (i.e., documents produced by different software in an electronic format) has enormously increased the efficiency and flexibility of the creation, change, and distribution of documentation. However, not all of the consequences of this are positive. For example, a digital document is often less reliable than a paper document. A digital document has on average a lower life length, as its existence depends not only on the media in which it is stored but also on the tools by means of which it can be reproduced. In addition, the massive increase in volume of documentation makes it significantly more difficult to locate the information required. Although document management is relatively new in the world of computers, it has a long tradition elsewhere. Document management originated in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. For centuries, the main activities were document creation, its classification, and its archiving. These functions are parts of document management even today, but it is not now possible to perform them in a traditional way by using manual procedures. Also, certain new functions, nonexistent before the electronic age, have become very important. In modern technology, the content of a document is separate from its media. Similarly a document format is separated from its content. A particular document can be a part of a larger document or can be composed of different documents. These new functions provide many new opportunities for the effective exploration of documentation, but they also require the use of new tools. Document management has in recent years emerged as a new information and engineering discipline. The purpose of document management is similar to that of PDM (“to provide the right users with the right information at the right time” [1]). A document management system (DMS) is a collection of different tools, intended for use in the management of the life cycles of documents.

This chapter contains a survey of basic document management functions to give the reader an introduction to the use of document management. A list of certain document management Internet resources and an extensive list of document management products and service providers at the end of the chapter give the reader more possibilities for further exploration of this area.

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