Document Management provides a secure location for storing electronic objects and an index for quickly identifying and retrieving information.
A comparison can be made to the local public library. Information is stored in a variety of collections within the library. The collections are made up of similar materials; i.e. fiction, nonfiction, reference, and periodicals. Accessing the materials is best accomplished by using the card catalog. Each card in the card catalog contains a common set of information about the particular resource. Common indexing values include subject, title and author. By reviewing the information on the cards, the user can quickly identify a subset of items they need to peruse to find the information they are looking for. If the universe of information matching the index query is too large, more detail can be added to reduce the items matching the query. If it is too narrow, the query can be broadened to gather more possible matches. Many times the search results list will identify the exact resource needed without the need to actually look at the item.
Document management works in a similar fashion. Libraries are created to manage the document and information assets belonging to an organization. A standard set of indexing fields is created to simplify retrieval of needed documents. As documents are added to the library, indexing values are added. Many of the index values are automatically generated based on a lookup of a known index key.
In addition to standard indexing, text based and image documents with embedded text can be processed to enable full text search. The capability enables users to perform complex text searches across entire libraries or a smaller subset of records. Complex searches using relationships between words, proximity, Boolean operators and other context based search tools make it possible to efficiently search hundreds or thousands of pages with a single query.