Document Management
Perspectives

Document Management Systems

There are three major groupings of document management systems, which can be combined in many ways to build a corporate document management solution.

1. Workgroup (work-in-process) Systems.

Targeted for the management of documents related to a customer, project, department, or office. Many of these documents are locally authored. Primary concerns are for version and multi-author controls, security to preserve client or customer trust, and searching facilities to locate all documents related to a customer, author, or topic.

2. Document Library Systems.

Built for storage and retrieval of large bodies of information. The document repositories may be centralized or distributed across many locations. Examples include insurance policy information, engineering and facility documents, and academic and technical documents. Much of the content may be archival, so that multiple storage media must be supported.

 

3. Transaction Systems.

Engineered for handling volumes of external authored documents. The documents may arrive electronically or have been scanned from paper. Typical examples, include mortgage application processing, insurance underwriting and claims, order processing, and governmental document processing. The focus of transactions systems is on moving these documents through a workflow process.

Vendor Product Features

Vendor products have varying feature sets, with a core set of capabilities. A customer should be examining each offering to evaluate capabilities for the following areas:

• Document organization features, such as various foldering methodologies.
• Control and document status features, such as versioning.
• Security capabilities using multiple control and access schemes.
• Reliability and availability.
• Performance under load.
• Scalability.
• Cost factors, per item and per seat.
• Platform, operating system, and language choices.
• Vendor support to migrate to and support future platform, operating system, and language choices.
• Problem determination and software fixes: support structure, staff, tools, repositories, and systems
• Existence of trained business partners providing useful products and services.
• Supported linkages to complementary products, such as COLD and workflow offerings.
• Industry-standard interfaces, such as ODMA and DMA.
• Out-if-the-box desktop interfaces.
• Standard data element search and integration support for full-text search facilities.
• Support for batch, client/server, and Internet access.
• Transfer and retrieval from archival storage.
• Support of new scanning, OCR, and optical storage hardware and devices.
• Features and assurances of document integrity to support legal discovery and authentication.
• Participation of vendor in industry coalitions and standards groups..
• Supported interfaces to using industry workflow, email, and printing standards..
• Desktop application integration facilities (Components, controls, objects, and APIs).
• Classes, manuals, guides, design assistance, and service offerings.

Current Concerns

The document management business is continuing to evolve rapidly, with new technologies for full-text search, Internet access, industry integration standards, and cross-product integration (suites) demanding many new product enhancements.

History shows that customer resources which have gone into building and maintaining communications, database, and messaging subsystems, can be freed to work on critical business application development needs by utilizing standard commercially supported document management products. Usable and standard APIs are key to being able to extend and enhance the vendor supplied products.

No single vendor product will provide all the capabilities needed for an organizational solution. The focus of much of this site is on identifying, designing, and implementing effective solutions using vendor building blocks, and in particular, integrating multiple vendor offerings into a unified system.

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Copyright © 1997-2000 by Gary M. Gershon. All rights reserved.

Last Changed: 08/19/00

Comments to: Gary Gershon (Gershon@Celsus.Net)