Role of document management software
Document management software is designed coordinate and control the documents created, maintained, and used within a firm or organization. Virtually all electronic document management systems also offer additional functionality as a rule—including version control, document archiving, full-text indexing, content-based retrieval, network mirroring, workflow, and so forth. But the heart and soul of document management consists of cataloging and tracking documents.
This means that the document manager must somehow extract or derive “information about the documents,” often referred to as document profiles or metadata, keeping it separate from the information in the documents themselves. It is critical to distinguish document profile information from document content. The critical role that documents serve within an organization cannot be over-stated. Documents are a firm’s intellectual assets—in much the same way that staff are human assets. In order to manage employees effectively, firms maintain human resource records—frequently handled by an entire department dedicated to that function. A document management system performs an analogous function by maintaining document resource records.
The document manager must have the means to store, edit and retrieve the document resource records, or profile information, for the documents under its control. The obvious solution is to use a database system of some kind. Storing profile information in a database affords all the advantages inherent in database technology to the document manager. By means of a database the document manager can handle a vast amount of information that can be stored, organized, and searched quickly and efficiently by large numbers of users. The database contributes an element of structure in parallel with the document repository, which consists of largely unstructured data.