Document management technology helps organizations better manage the creation, revision, approval, and consumption of electronic documents.  It provides key features such as library services, document profiling, searching, check-in, check-out, version control, revision history, and document security.

Paper generally enters the organization through a scanner, or sometimes, a multifunction device.  In centralized scan operations, large volumes of paper are put into the system by dedicated workers. In distributed operations, smaller volumes of documents are captured with lower volume scanners or multifunction devices closer to their point of creation.

Business forms are ingested into the system. Most forms today are “structured” and the location of the form elements is known. The ability to process unstructured forms, those without a pre-defined form template, is improving.

Software captures the image of the paper document. Increasingly, electronic document images have the same legal status as a paper document.

Technologies that allow paper information to be translated to electronic data without manual data input. Recognition technologies have progressive capabilities from optical character recognition (OCR) to intelligent character recognitions (ICR) and are important for converting large amounts of forms or unstructured data to usable information in a content management system.

Taxonomy provides a formal structure for information, based on the individual needs of a business. Categorization tools automate the placement of content (document images, email, text documents, i.e., all electronic content) for future retrieval based on the taxonomy.  Users can also manually categorize documents. Critical step to ensure that content is properly stored.

An essential part of the capture process, creates metadata from scanned documents (customer ID number, for example) so the document can be found. Indexing can be based on keywords or full-text.

Document management technology helps organizations better manage the creation, revision, approval, and consumption of electronic documents.  It provides key features such as library services, document profiling, searching, check-in, check-out, version control, revision history, and document security.