DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
Key Features: With the average cost of each wasted page being about six cents, a company with 500 employees could be spending $42,000per year on wasted prints. A document management system (DMS) is a system (based on computer programs in the case of the management of digital documents) used to track, manage and store documents and reduce paper. Most are capable of keeping a record of the various versions created and modified by different users (history tracking). The term has some overlap with the concepts of content management systems. It is often viewed as a component of enterprise content management (ECM) systems and related to digital asset management, document imaging, workflow systems and records management systems.
These systems enabled an organization to capture faxes and forms, to save copies of the documents as images, and to store the image files in the repository for security and quick retrieval (retrieval made possible because the system handled the extraction of the text from the document in the process of capture, and the text-indexer function provided text-retrieval capabilities).
While many EDM systems store documents in their native file format (Microsoft Word or Excel, PDF), some web-based document management systems are beginning to store content in the form of html. These policy management systems require content to be imported into the system. However, once content is imported, the software (ex. Corona Document Management System) acts like a search engine so users can find what they are looking for faster. The html format allows for better application of search capabilities such as full-text searching and stemming.