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:
-
Add information about a document to the file that contains the document
-
Organize the user-supplied information in a database
-
Create information about the relationships between different documents
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:
-
Author: who wrote or contributed to the document
-
Main topics: what subjects are covered in the document
-
Origination date: when was it started
-
Completion date: when was it finished
-
Related documents: what other documents are relevant to this document
-
Associated applications: what programs are used to process the document
-
Case: to which legal case (or other business process) is the document
related
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:
-
Version tracking: see how a document evolves over time
-
Document sharing: see in what business processes the document is
used and re-used
-
Electronic review: enable users to add their comments to a document
without actually changing the document itself
-
Document security: refine the different types of access that different
users need to the document
-
Publishing management: control the delivery of documents to different
publishing process queues
-
Workflow integration: associate the different stages of a document's
life-cycle with people and projects with schedules
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.