Document management system

A document management system (DMS) is usually a computerized system used to store, share, track and manage files or documents. Some systems include history tracking where a log of the various versions created and modified by different users is recorded. The term has some overlap with the concepts of content management systems. It is often viewed as a component of enterprise content management (ECM) systems and related to digital asset management, document imaging, workflow systems and records management systems. Beginning in the 1980s, a number of vendors began to develop software systems to manage paper-based documents. These systems dealt with paper documents, including printed and published documents and photographs, prints, etc. Later developers began to write a second type of system that could manage electronic documents, i.e., all those documents, or files, created on computers, and often stored on users' local s. The earliest Electronic document management (EDM) systems managed either proprietary file types or a limited number of s. Many of these systems later became known as document imaging systems, because they focused on the capture, storage, indexing and retrieval of . EDM systems evolved to a point where systems could manage any 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.