Documents Management

Travelling from when scrolls were systematically stored in the time of Ancient Rome through to the invention of filing cabinets in 1892 by Dr Rosenau, physical paper-based documents were created, edited, stored, viewed, shared and retrieved. In essence, this involved the efficient production, tracking and, storage and retrieval of documents - this is Documents Management!

More recently, the massive centralised computing capability of mainframes meant that in addition to the growing volume of paper documents stored in filing cabinets, businesses created even more documents, which could be either printed and stored in filing cabinets or stored electronically. The introduction of computer document scanners in the 1980’s meant that paper documents could be stored electronically in digital archives within centralised computers. Further traction for Documents Management came as a result of the production of electronic and paper documents increasing as computing technology evolved towards a more distributed architecture via servers and PC’s – although this technology provided organisations with flexible and efficient business tools, the nature of PC’s managed by local area networks meant that documents became increasingly distributed throughout the company with differing structure.

In addition to the problem of documents distributed throughout organisations without a common structure, there was a lack of version control, auditing, security or any efficient method to retrieve paper or electronic documents – this increased the need for Documents Management Software.

In essence, Documents Management Solutions involve the use of computers and software to manage, track and store electronic documents and images of paper documents captured by a document scanner.

Find out more about Documents Management by visiting our What is Document Management page.