Document scanning, electronic storage and online document management

To understand document management it's important to be clear about the main terminology used:

1. Document scanning

   This means getting images of paper documents using scanners or multifunction printers. These use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert images into text that a computer can recognise.
   
   

2. Indexing of your scanned documents

   Indexing may simply be a question of keeping track of unique document identifiers. Or it can be more complex, where classification of documents' metadata is provided, or word indexes are extracted from the documents' contents.
   
   

3. Integration of your documents

   A document management software can (among many other functions) integrate documents directly into other computer applications, allowing users to access a document online and enabling them to extract documents from a central repository, make changes and save the changed document back to the repository as a new version.
   
   

4. Electronic storage of your documents

   The electronic storage of your documents is commonly done on hard disks or on web-based systems; the concept of electronic storage also includes how documents are moved from one location to another, in what form they are stored (word file or pdf for example) and for how long.
   
   

5. Retrieval of your documents

   Retrieval varies in its complexity from the very simple - where a named document is found and printed or put on screen - to more involved kinds of retrieval where a user may enter a search term and be given a range of documents online (as with a Google search). Some document management systems allow you to specify a 'Boolean expression' containing multiple keywords or example phrases that you expect will be in the document contents.