Computer Data Recovery

Modern day enterprises rely heavily on Document Management Systems for hassle-free maintenance of their enterprise documents. In today’s competitive world, information is considered synonymous to money. Access to the right information, at the right time in a cost-effective manner is considered highly crucial to survival.

Electronic document management systems are computer applications that are used to store documents in electronic form. Sometimes scanned images of paper documents are also archived. Electronic document management systems are considered components of Content Management Systems (CMS) that have become highly sought after items. Enterprises today spend heavily on digital asset management and a document management solution is aimed at this broader goal.

Before investing in a document management solution, enterprises should have to assess the following criteria:

• Installation location of the system – centralized or decentralized
• Filing method for document management
• Retrieval methods, especially, deployment of highly efficient search process
• Desired multi-tiered security level
• Disaster recovery and business continuity mechanism
• Retention period of documents before they are phased out
• Archival process for future reference
• Mechanism to allow multiple access to a single document and version control scheme
• Ensuring authenticity of a document

There are several components of document management systems software. Let us explore them one by one.

Metadata

Metadata can be considered as data about data. For a document, metadata may refer to the date of the document storage and the identity of its creator. Some document management solutions extract these data automatically from the system, while some others prompt the user to enter them. Sometimes certain keywords are attached to a document for its easy retrieval later.

Integration

Many document management systems have modules that assist them in integrating with other corporate applications. This unified mechanism assists users in retrieval and modification of documents directly from the document management system, without leaving the original corporate application. This integration mechanism can be found generally in Office suites, email solutions, and groupware solutions. 

Capture

Capturing images of paper documents is a necessary, as well as a common process of maintaining documents through electronic document management systems. The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) method is used in capturing the images and to render them as machine-readable texts.

Indexing

Indexing help in classification of documents through unique document identifiers. The main purpose of indexing is to support quick document retrieval mechanism. Sometimes the indexing extracts necessary information from the document’s metadata. In some cases, the indexing process extracts the information directly from the document, based on in-built logic.

Storage

The storage component of a document management system looks after the physical storage area of documents. Duration of storage and migration of documents from one storage media to another also come under the ambit of the storage component.

Retrieval

This is one of the most crucial aspects of document management. The process involves fetching the right document from the storage media. The retrieval process can become highly complex in some cases.

The simple retrieval process allows the user to enter the unique document identifier in order to fetch it. Relatively complex retrieval mechanism prompts the user to enter search phrases and other components of the document’s metadata. The more the number of search criteria furnished, the narrower the search result would become. In some systems, the retrieval mechanism is highly efficient (though time-consuming) and prompts the user to enter a Boolean expression combining one or more keywords and metadata components. Such mechanism is highly fruitful where the number of documents stored is huge and the user wants a short, filtered search outcome in order to access the document as quickly as possible.

Distribution

Document Management Systems should ensure that documents that are distributed could not be easily modified by unauthorized persons. This is particularly important in regulatory law environments where the master copy is never distributed, but only archived. The crux of electronic distribution of documents lies in electronic endorsement and validation of the copies. Where documents need to be inter-exchanged, the integrity of the documents should be ensured.

Security

Security is highly crucial in document management solutions. Certain types of documents, say, medical documents, have to comply with security requirements. Some document management systems have right control modules enabling document owners to restrict access to the document to certain people or groups only. The access may be given in one or more of the forms “read-only” and “write”. 

Collaboration

One of the key attributes of document management systems is collaboration. Documents should be free to be worked upon in a distributed environment by multiple users. When one user works on a document, it should appear “locked” for others and they should not be able to modify it at the same time.

Versioning

Versioning is useful for documents that are susceptible to periodic modifications. It is also one of the key features of a document management system. Users should be allowed access to previous versions of a document as per requirement.