Document Management Systems - enable you to store documents electronically. This facilitates the process of retrieving, sharing, tracking, revising, and distributing documents and the information they contain. A complete Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) provides you with all the software and hardware required to insure that you maintain control over all your documents, both scanned images, and files that were created on a computer--like spreadsheets, word
processing documents and graphics. A complete EDMS includes document imaging, OCR, text retrieval, workflow, and Computer Output to Laser Disk capabilities.
 

You are going to hear a lot about document imaging in the near future. You will hear about the need for scanners, importing documents, saving documents to optical
cartridges, etc. One of the first questions asked about document imaging is what type of documents can be stored?

The industry is finding more and more applications every day. You can store accounting information, such as purchase orders, invoices, correspondence, and the
other papers that are handled daily. You can store pictures and part numbers for catalog items. Basically, you can store any documents to which you need quick
access.

Since you CAN store any type of document, the next question is WHY would I want to store the information on a document imaging system? The answer is simple
--- quick retrieval. Optical storage allows you to save approximately 20,000 to 40,000 documents per optical disk. Indexes are created when the document is
imaged to allow one to retrieve the document by multiple codes or fields.

For example, you could index the purchase orders by purchase order number, company name, and by date. This would allow you to look up the document by a
specific purchase order number and retrieve the document image to the screen for instant access. You can also build more complex queries that would allow you to
retrieve all purchase orders for company ABC between specific dates.

HOW does the data get into the system? The most common way to capture data for a document management system is to use a scanner. You can also capture data
by importing the information from various popular windows-based word processing and/or spreadsheet software. Images can also be captured from fax software.

Once the image is captured, the fields of index data must be input. You customize the indexes to fit your application. High-Tech Computer Experts (HTCE), will
help you design the indexes that will work for the type of documents that you want to store.

If your documents consist of forms, it may be possible to do automatic indexing. A template can be created to tell the system where the index data to be captured is
located on the page. The template would then "read" (or OCR -- Optical Character Reader) the page and some of the index data would be input automatically. This
will shorten the time to get your records stored & indexed.

Because the document management programs deal with images, some faster equipment is needed to run the system. The programs will run on a 486 processor, but
the speeds are more acceptable on a pentium machine. As discussed before, a scanner is necessary to get most of the data into the system.

The images created in the document management system can be stored on a hard drive, but if the amount of document storage is high, the images can be stored to an
optical cartridge. The optical cartridge is similar to a music CD or a CD that goes in the standard CD-ROM. The difference is that the optical cartridge may be
written to, just as you would to a 3.5" diskette. Optical cartridges can also be housed in a jukebox, much like the old music 45's of yesterday. If the data requested
is not on the optical cartridge currently in the drive, the jukebox will use its arm and place the correct disk into the drive. Many jukeboxes come with as much as
20G to 40G of storage. The most often used type of Optical cartridge is the WORM (Write Once, Read Many) variety. This allows companies with security issues
to prevent unauthorized tampering with CD's.

Instead of trying to hunt down the document that you need, these advances in document storage will allow you to have those documents at your fingertips.

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