Electronic Document Management Solutions Document Management, or Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS), is the computerized management of documentation by a software program. As corporations better understand the process efficiencies and cost-savings involved, the 'paperless office' is more and more becoming a reality. Electronic Document Management Systems help companies move towards or maintain the 'paperless' paradigm while leveraging technologies to maximize the benefit of soft documentation.
 The functionality provided by Electronic Document Management Software (EDMS) can range greatly depending on the level of sophistication of the given software but generally include to some degree many of the following features: - Input: the ability to simply add documents directly into the EDM system via scanning, upload or other means. This can include many forms of documents such as emails, images, and other media
- Retrieval: access and download of the documents generally by means of some search mechanism such as by document name, type, fulltext content or metadata keyword
- Organization: structured, logical organization of documents, within an intuitive file structure for instance
- Security: a robust security framework that authenticates users, provides or denies access, and manages level of access (such as view/edit/add/delete) to documents and other content within the system
- Version Control: management of concurrent document access and full change-tracking via storage of all document versions
All Electronic Document Management Systems do not necessarily provide the full functionality described above. Some EDMS, for instance, may provide searching by document name and type, but not by fulltext content or document metadata, others may provide full featured searching but no direct scanning capabilities, yet others may not provide adequate document security or intuitive organization of documents.
In addition some Electronic Document Management Systems may provide the following advanced features as well: - Collaboration: a full featured platform for managing team collaboration on a given project or entity. Features may include shared project folders, team calendars, disscussion forums, issue and milestone lists etc.
- Integration: full integration with the office and email clients, already in use by most employees.
- External Integration: the ability to integrate with external data or frameworks already in use by the companies
- External Authentication: the ability to authenticate users against external authentication systems already in place in most companies (AD, Netscape etc.)
- Back-data load: tools to assist in the loading of legacy documentation into the EDM repository
- Record Management, Archival, and Compliance: provides tools to help clients manage the long term storage of their documents and achieve industry and goverment compliance
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Document Management Software