What you should know about the role of electronic document management (EDM)
The electronic document management (EDM) is a computerized method for organizing and managing information and electronic documents within an organization. It mainly implements systems for the acquisition, classification, storage and archiving of documents.
The process entails collaboration and information exchange. It is an objective process which stems from the life cycle of the document. And can help save time and money for huge organizations but is also necessary to avoid chaos in small businesses, especially those that rely on online data to deliver their services such as an internet marketing or seo agency.
It allows the indexing of documents and especially digitization which compresses the volume of paper. EDM uses statistical algorithms to classify and retrieve documents by relevance.
The different document management techniques are heavily dependent on one another, the use of a component is generally not practical without access to other components.
All product categories assimilate different types of documents – scanned facsimiles, incoming fax, files from office applications, multimedia objects, etc. These are managed using the database, and independent of conventional hierarchical file management systems.
According to the small business experts at problogineer.com there are four major steps in the electronic document management: acquisition, classification, storage and dissemination.
The acquisition may either be through:
– The integration of existing paper documents: scanning paper documents. Where possible and useful, scanned documents can then be sorted via an RAD technology. It is also practical to extract information from scanned images. This technology can use technical OCR, barcode recognition and ICR with such rules of language audits on recognized words.
Paper documents can be destroyed if the probative value (or evidence) is uncertain or archived if all is well.
– The integration of existing electronic documents: Another family of documents consists of electronic documents such as office files, PDF files.
– Production of electronic documents: it may be the result of one or more procedures managed by different agents through a group of computer software (groupware). The document can also be obtained by a business intelligence software from a template available via the tool.
– The exchange of electronic documents: it takes place when two partners wish to share electronic documents. They can then proceed to interconnect their information systems by a system of EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) subject to compliance with the same data format standard.
Indexing is the description of the document and its content in order to facilitate its operation. It differs in this respect:
– The index type: it provides a formal description of the document using its metadata (type, author, title, source, date, etc). Whose vocabulary is standardized to allow the use of metadata by the largest number of research tools.
– Indexing by concepts or keywords: document content facilitates search operations. System designer or creator of the document identifies words that appear most often and are called indexing statistics. It can also be a more sophisticated system where the designer selects the terms in a thesaurus (list of words linked by relations of hierarchy or equivalency) related to the document.
Storage
The problem of storage is unavoidable. Not taking into account this aspect can lead to critical situations, which include:
– The drive has to be adapted as closely as possible with the volume of documents. It must also, according to the frequency of consultation and the importance of data, offer a low access time.
– The organization of storage can be prioritized based on the contents of documents (text, video, image, etc..).
– The shelf life should also be considered to allow for periodic cleaning of the system, to facilitate the storage and supply of records. To this end, the system must take into account output to a permanent storage in an electronic archiving platform dedicated for this purpose.
Dissemination of documents
Dissemination of documents can be made via the internet or intranet. Some software companies offer a GED consultation thin client that provides all or part of the functionality of consultation and document indexing in a web browser. According to a study, improving access to information and information sharing are the main motivations in the draft document management.