Document Management Systems
Document management controls the life cycle of documents in your organization — how they are created, reviewed, and published, and how they are ultimately disposed of or retained. Although the term "management" implies that information is controlled from the top of the organization, an effective document management system should reflect the culture of the organization that uses it. The tools that you use for document management should be flexible enough to enable you to tightly control a document's life cycle, if that fits your enterprise's culture and goals, but also to let you implement a more loosely structured system, if that better suits your enterprise.
The elements of a document management system
- An effective document management solution specifies the following:
- What kinds of documents and other content can be created in an organization.
- What template to use for each kind of document.
- What metadata to provide for each kind of document.
- Where to store a document at each stage of its life cycle.
- How to control access to a document at each stage of its life cycle.
- How to move documents within the organization as team members contribute to the documents' creation, review, approval, publication, and disposition.
- What policies to apply to documents so that document-related actions are audited, documents are retained or disposed of appropriately, and content that is important to the organization is protected.
- Whether a document has to be converted from one format to another as it moves through the stages of its life cycle.
- How to handle documents as corporate records, which must be retained according to legal requirements and corporate guidelines.
SharePoint Server 2010 includes features that implement all these aspects of document management. To ensure that information workers can easily take advantage of these capabilities without having to depart from their day-to-day operations and familiar tools, applications in the Microsoft Office system — such as Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word — also include features that support each stage in a document's life cycle.
