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1. Document Management: Organizing Files

Document management as a technology and a discipline has traditionally augmented the capabilities of a computer's file system. By enabling users to characterize their documents, which are usually stored in files, document management systems enable users to store, retrieve, and use their documents more easily and powerfully than they can do within the file system itself.
Long before anyone thought of XML, document management systems were originally developed to help law offices maintain better control over and access to the many documents that legal professionals generate. The basic mechanisms of the first document management systems performed, among others, these simple but powerful tasks:
In essence, document management systems created libraries of documents in a computer system or a network. The document library contained a "card catalog" where the user-supplied information was stored and through which users could find out about the documents and access them. The card catalog was a database that captured information about a document, such as these:
Armed with a database of such information about documents, users could find information in more sensible and intuitive ways than scanning different directories' lists of contents, hoping that a file's name might reveal what the file contained. Many people consider document management systems' first achievement to have created "a file system within the file system."
Soon, document management systems began to provide additional and valuable functionality. By enriching the databases of information about the documents (the metadata), these systems provided these capabilities:
These critical capabilities (among others) of document management systems have proven enormously successful, fueling a multi-billion dollar business led by Documentum, Xerox, IBM, and others.

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