Document Management is a set of technologies for managing the "document life cycle," that is, it tracks, monitors, and allocates resources for the creation, use, revision, approval, retrieval, archival and disposal of documents. The term document used here loosely applies to any container of information, whether electronic or not, whether text or not, and whether business-critical or not.
The Gartner Group defines document management as "a highly integrated set of middleware services that integrate library services, document manufacturing, and document interchange with critical business process applications around a client-server topology using open application interfaces."
IDC defines document management as a software system that is capable of organizing document production, managing accessibility and distribution of volumes of textual documents and overseeing document flow.
Contains links to Document Management professional and technical associations, informational and educational websites, magazines and other publications, and non-commercial sites of general interest to the document management community. These sites must meaningfully address the management (access, revision, retrieval, archival and disposal) of any form of digital information.
This category is for companies who provide electronic document management products. There are other categories for document imaging, consultancy and workflow. There is also a sub-category for those products which manage the content and output of documents within this category.
Document Management encompasses many processes and many forms of information. As such we wrote some guidelines to help you submit the site to the best category.
First, this category accepts only software. Services or Consulting should be listed somewhere in
Business/Industry/ or
Computers/Consulting/.
Industry-specific software should be listed with its industry category. "Records management," for example, is usually industry-specific.
Next, the software must be able to manage any form of digital information. If not, consider submitting somewhere under
Document Imaging,
File Managers,
Image Cataloguing,
CAD (and
Engineering PDM/PLM),
Regulatory Compliance
Audio
or Video.
Finally, the software must, at the minimum, track the use, revision, retrieval, archival and disposal of such information.. If not, consider submitting somewhere under Groupware, Collaboration, Information Retrieval, Workflow, Databases, File Conversion and Archiving (Backup).
- Software for creating and viewing files are listed under their respective file formats. Finding and retrieving files across networks is in File Management: Search.
- If the software is Internet-based, the best category is most probably within Computers/Internet/. For example, managing digital information in websites is now called Content Management.
- Software for digitizing paper forms and documents is in Automated Forms Processing. Output solutions can find a home in Computers/Hardware/.
- If the software are multiple tools deeply intended to "creating a ''repository'' of collective knowledge, intellectual capital, skills, and experience" in an organization, it will be welcome in Knowledge Management: Software and Tools.