What is a document management system?

A Document management system is nothing more than taking advantage of the efficiencies and convenience that technology provides and applying it to a current filing system. Much like email has replaced the traditional memo, document management systems capture all of the paper we deal with, and it gives us access to information at anytime, anywhere, and with great speed. Once scanned or imported into the system, documents & files can be displayed, archived, retrieved, faxed, copied, printed, emailed, routed, and received in seconds. A document management system can synergize paper files, emails, spreadsheets, word documents, PDFs, audio files, video clips, and more, all in one centralized location. There are many reasons why ALL businesses can benefit from the electronic filing of documents. These include:
 
- Significantly reduce the costs associated with the handling of paper
- Enhances customer service with instant access to information
- Provides seamless integration with existing applications
- Dramatically increases the efficiency of searching for documents
- Prevents documents from becoming lost or misplaced
- Enforces granular security rules on confidential material
- Keeps an audit trail on all that is happening with your files
- Ensures that documents are protected and preserved during an unforeseen disaster
- Promotes office collaboration and participation in document creation
- Facilitates document retention schedules & policies
- Automates the path that documents follow throughout the organization
- Helps meet the complex requirements of industry compliance (HIPAA, SEC, Sarbanes Oxley)

What is a “document?”

A document can be from one to several thousand pages, and can include images and/or text, plus annotations, and one template (index card).
 
Can I edit or alter images?

An imaging system should not provide any facility for editing or altering images. This is important as many users consider that images should be sacrosanct and that any changes would undermine the integrity of the system. In addition, the system should provide an audit trail function to keep track of which users have accessed which documents at what times.

Do imaging systems support audit trails?

An imaging system’s audit trail product should record a user name, date, time, document name and action whenever a user accesses a database or document. Various levels of audit-trail logging detail and activity tracking should be available. The system should also support a viewer for sorting and filtering these logs.

What is the standard format used to store images?

Black and white images are most commonly stored as standard TIFF files using CCITT Group 4 (two-dimensional) compression. Grayscale and color images are frequently stored as TIFF files with JPEG compression. How much disk space will I need? With the rapid drop in prices for hard drives and optical media, it costs much less to store documents on an imaging system than with paper. A single page typically occupies around 50KB of disk space if the image is stored in TIFF Group IV. Each gigabyte (GB) of storage space (which costs only a few dollars) will hold approximately 20,000 pages.

What is OCR?

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, which is how a computer converts words in an unsearchable scanned image to searchable text. OCR is usually necessary in order to use full-text indexing and searches, and it should be included in an imaging system. OCR engines can generally only recognize typed or laser-printed text, not handwriting. What file formats can a versatile system import? A versatile system should be able to import the files you would encounter in your office. This includes word processing files, spreadsheets and presentations as well as common image formats such as TIFF 4, TIFF 3, TIFF Raw, TIFF LZW, PCX, BMP, CALS, JPEG, GIF, PICT, PNG and EPS Preview images. An imaging system providing long term archival of documents should allow the images of each page to be stored in a non-proprietary format. For example, electronic document pages would be “printed” to the imaging system, black and white graphical files would be converted to TIFF Group 4 format and color/grayscale images would be converted to TIFF JPEG.

What image resolution should I use?

Most imaging systems can support documents scanned at various resolutions, from 50 dpi to 600 dpi (or more) depending on your scanner. Depending on the purpose and the contents of the page, most documents are scanned in black and white at 300 dpi.

What is the difference between OCR and indexing?

OCR is the process of converting scanned images to text files. Full-text indexing is the process of taking a text file and adding each word to an index file that specifies the location of every word on every document. Well designed imaging software can make this a fast and easy procedure, providing rapid access to any word in any document.

How accurate is OCR?

Accuracy on a freshly laser-printed page is typically better than 99.6%. Accuracy on faxed, dirty or degraded documents will of course be lower, but a few imaging systems have image clean-up technology that can improve OCR accuracy.

What is Day Forward Scanning?

It is the>scanning of all your documents, invoices, and any paper that is currently in use to date. Many companies today are choosing not dedicate in-house staff to scanning in their current documents in an effort to save valuable resources and allowing them to be more productive in their jobs. Most of these companies already have a document or information management solution in place and, currently in use at their location.

Are documents secured?

Yes. All content is placed in folders and individual users or user groups are given access to these folders. A user not included on a folder’s read access list will not be able to view its constituent documents.

Can I limit access to certain documents?

Yes, there are three different access levels for documents. The first area is the document’s authors, identified at the original import stage or given write access once document is held within the system. The authors can then check the document out, modify it and then check-it back in. The second are the approvers who can review a document and then either approve or reject it. Finally, there are the normal users who have read-only access to documents.

How much disk space will I need?

With the rapid drop in prices for hard drives and optical media, it costs much less to store documents on an imaging system than with paper. A single page typically occupies around 50KB of disk space if the image is stored in TIFF Group IV. Each gigabyte (GB) of storage space (which costs only a few dollars) will hold approximately 20,000 pages.