Document Management System - History

History

Beginning in the 1980s, a number of vendors began developing software systems to manage paper-based documents. These systems dealt with paper documents, which included not only printed and published documents, but also photographs, prints, etc.

Later developers began to write a second type of system which could manage electronic documents, i.e., all those documents, or files, created on computers, and often stored on users' local file-systems. The earliest electronic document management (EDM) systems managed either proprietary file types, or a limited number of file formats. Many of these systems later became known as document imaging systems, because they focused on the capture, storage, indexing and retrieval of image file formats. EDM systems evolved to a point where systems could manage any type of file format that could be stored on the network. The applications grew to encompass electronic documents, collaboration tools, security, workflow, and auditing capabilities.

These systems enabled an organization to capture faxes and forms, to save copies of the documents as images, and to store the image files in the repository for security and quick retrieval (retrieval made possible because the system handled the extraction of the text from the document in the process of capture, and the text-indexer function provided text-retrieval capabilities).

While many EDM systems store documents in their native file format (Microsoft Word or Excel, PDF), some web-based document management systems are beginning to store content in the form of html. These policy management systems require content to be imported into the system. However, once content is imported, the software acts like a search engine so users can find what they are looking for faster. The html format allows for better application of search capabilities such as full-text searching and stemming.