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Presentation:
Computerized document management System: DocMan does it all
An introduction to general concepts in Computerized Document management
System:
Paper to Electronic(computerized) Document Management:
Safeguards documents from getting lost
Saves expensive storage space
Eases management of documents
Enables finding documents fast
Documents images are available in a secure central place
Reduces need for filing cabinets
Steps required for computerized document management system:
Convert documents into electronic formats
In today’s environment, documents are a mix breed of electronic
and paper documents. Some documents are computer generated and,
therefore, are already in electronic format and the rest are in
paper format. The contents of document can be text, mathematical
formulae, graphic images, drawings, paintings, picture or photographs,
tables of data, spread sheet, certificates and even audio or video
files and so on. Our first requirement is to have all documents
in the electronic format so that they are storable in the computer
hard discs.
Scanning
Present day scanning technology make it easy, fast and economic
to convert paper document to electronic image. Being an image, this
is no longer editable. A reference document is normally not meant
to be editable. Even the original paper document is not editable.
OCRing (Optical Character Recognition)
However, many a time, a new text document is required to be generated
based on an old reference document. Having the old reference document
in the computer in an editable form can be of great help. It is
worth its while, to convert such paper text document to electronic
format in editable form. This is a two-step process.
1. As a first step, scan the paper document into an electronic image.
2. In second step, process the text part of the image through OCR
software. This software tries to recognise each character in the
image and converts to digital font and checks with its built-in
dictionary for correctness. Some times if the scanned image quality
is not good,(due to many reasons)it may not be able to recognise
a word. In such cases the word is left as an image or user intervention
is required. This can sometimes be quite an involved process and
can consume a lot of high quality man-hours leading to high cost
of conversion.
Storage
A good and dependable storage system in the computer will be necessary
to store all the electronic documents. Hard discs or Optical discs
with back-up facility should be available. The system should be
able to accommodate growing volume of documents and also accept
changes.
Indexing
The system should create automatically a index code for the documents
as they are sent to respective folders in the document management
system. This would facilitate creation of an organised document
filing system and would make future retrieval or search easier.
A good indexing system can help many present and future systems
very efficient and effective.
Retrieval
A good retrieval system must be an integral part of the overall
system. The systems should be able to guide the user to the right
document, fast and easy. Such a system tries to replicate a physical
system of filing cabinets, drawers, folders and documents. It relates
document to the object or topic through intuitive process.
Access
Document access should be controllable so that access is given to
only authorized people and groups. Also a good system should ensure
protection original documents.
Summary Data on Documents.
As soon as a new document is added to the system, certain related
data should be saved for later searches and retrieval. These data
will identify a document and its content, address, unique code,
author, date of creation etc. in a Properties dialog box. Expecting
users to complete such dialog box every time they create a document
may not be very realistic. However, the administrator can be presented
with a form to be filled in with these data when a document is added.
The following data can be part of a document:
· Document name
· Document size
· Created date and time
· Keywords to identify document
· Document location
· Author name
· Company
· Category
· Comments
· Contents information
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