CENTRALLY MANAGE ALL DOCUMENTS
All the information in the world is worthless if you cannot find and access it. That’s where document management applications come into play.
Windows Explorer, a file management application, is an example of a simple, computer-mediated document management system. File managers have rudimentary indexing and search capabilities that include sorting files by name, type, or date, and linear text searching of filenames or file contents. Electronic mail and groupware programs that let you build complex folder sets for storing e-mail, like MS Exchange and Lotus Notes, also fall into this category.
However, those applications are usually, in practice, managed individually, not as organizational resources. Document management in an enterprise should provide and control access to the sum total of an organization's information holdings as a centrally managed system. In addition, business processes can be embedded to provide a workflow throughout a business or organization. This is not, however, a trivial task.
From a management standpoint, it means identifying the information we use and categorizing it by organization, function, process, use, or some combination of these and other factors. It also includes knowing how much information your organization stores, handles and transmits, and the relative importance of each information stream that flows through the organization.
From the technical side it means providing the technology to support business use of that information, including network services, storage media, user account management, bandwidth and connectivity. This can be difficult enough when information sits in one place. It becomes somewhat more complex when we start moving it around.
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