Roles and Responsibilities

There are several departments that have had primary responsibility for one or more functions in document management. It is these "document support" departments that will find it especially important to work together and coordinate their efforts. It will become their responsibility to develop the infrastructure needed to enable electronic document management. The primary document support departments are: The I/S Department - The technology is advanced enough and pervasive enough that the I/S function probably will be given the responsibility for building the technical infrastructure of the organization to embrace it.

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Records management - With its tradition in library science, Records Management has strong experience in document management practices, with particular emphasis on archiving and retention management. Therefore, technology has been viewed mostly in terms of its ability to meet specific needs in traditional areas such as storage and retrieval. Office management - Most office work is computerized to some extent, but internal and external correspondence and reports still generate large amounts of redundant and hard-to-access paper files. In the future, these files will need increased cross referencing among departments, and integration with the I/S databases. Library - External sources of information are increasingly available in electronic form, with search and retrieval capability from large document collections.

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Reprographics and Printing - Computer-based technology is becoming dominant. New high speed printers and copiers are digital (not light- lens) and contain more computer power than many mainframes. As a result, offset printing presses may be an endangered species. Add a full line of networked Postscript printers to supply distributed printing and print-on- demand services, and central reprographics departments face an uncertain future. Training and Education - Increasingly based on multi-media documents and courseware, training is done "just in time" at the desktop as well as in more traditional classroom settings.

Description of Components
Document management systems commonly provide storage, versioning, metadata, security, as well as indexing and retrieval capabilities. 1. METADATA Metadata is typically stored for each document. Metadata may, for example, include the date the document was stored and the identity of the user storing it. The DMS may also extract metadata from the document automatically or prompt the user to add metadata.

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INTEGRATION Many document management systems attempt to integrate document management directly into other applications. Such integration is commonly available for office suites and e-mail or collaboration/groupware software. Integration often uses open standards such as ODMA, LDAP, WebDAV and SOAP to allow integration with other software and compliance with internal controls.

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CAPTURE Capture primarily involves accepting and processing images of paper documents from scanners or multifunction printers. Optical character recognition (OCR) software is used in order to convert digital images into machine readable text. Optical mark recognition (OMR) software is sometimes used to extract values of check-boxes or bubbles.

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INDEXING Indexing tracks electronic documents. Provides classification through the documents' metadata or even through word indexes extracted from the documents' contents. Indexing exists mainly to support retrieval. One area of critical importance for rapid retrieval is the creation of an index topology.

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STORAGE Storage of the documents often includes management of those same documents; where they are stored, for how long, migration of the documents from one storage media to another and eventual document destruction. RETRIEVAL Retrieve the electronic documents from the storage. Retrieval allows the user to specify partial search terms involving the document identifier and/or parts of the expected metadata.

Some systems provide the capability to specify a Boolean expression containing multiple keywords or example phrases expected to exist within the documents' contents.

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DISTRIBUTION A published document for distribution has to be in a format that can not be easily altered. If a document is to be distributed electronically in a regulatory environment, then the equipment tasking the job has to be quality endorsed and validated. SECURITY Document security is vital in many document management applications. Some document management systems have a rights management module that allows an administrator to give access to documents based on type to only certain people or groups of people. Document marking at the time of printing or PDF-creation is an essential element to preclude alteration or unintended use.

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WORKFLOW

Workflow is a complex process and some document management systems have a built-in workflow module. Manual workflow requires a user to view the document and decide whom to send it to. Rules-based workflow allows an administrator to create a rule that dictates the flow of the document through an organization.

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COLLABORATION A collaborative EDMS should allow documents to be retrieved and worked on by an authorized user. Access should be blocked to other users while work is being performed on the document. Advanced forms of collaboration allow multiple users to view and modify (or markup) a document at the same time in a collaboration session.

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VERSIONING Versioning is a process by which documents are checked in or out of the document management system. It allows users to retrieve previous versions and to continue work from a selected point. SEARCHING Searching finds documents and folders using template attributes or full text search.

Documents can be searched using various attributes and document content.

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PUBLISHING Publishing a document involves the procedures of proofreading, peer or public reviewing, authorizing, printing and approving etc. The published document should be in a format that is not easily altered without a specific knowledge or tools, and yet it is read-only or portable. REPRODUCTION Document/image reproduction is key when thinking about implementing a system.