Introduction to Document Management System (DMS)

• The elements of a document management system
• Introduction to project modules

Document management controls the life cycle of documents in your organization — how they are created, reviewed, published, and consumed, and how they are ultimately disposed of or retained. Although the term "management" implies top-down control of information, an effective document management system should reflect the culture of the organization using it. The tools you use for document management should be flexible, allowing you to tightly control documents' life cycles if that fits your enterprise's culture and goals, but also letting you implement a more loosely structured system if that better suits your enterprise.
A well-designed document management system promotes finding and sharing information easily. It organizes content in a logical way, and makes it easy to standardize content creation and presentation across an enterprise. It promotes knowledge management and information mining. It helps your organization meet its legal responsibilities. It provides features at each stage of a document's life cycle, from template creation to document authoring, reviewing, publishing, auditing, and ultimately destroying or archiving.
The Elements of a Document Management System
An effective document management solution specifies:

• What types of documents and other content can be created within an organization.
• What templates to use for each type of document.
• What metadata to provide for each type of document.
• Where to store documents at each stage of a document's 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 properly, and content important to the organization is protected.
• How documents are converted as they transition from one stage to another during their life cycles.
• How documents are treated as corporate records, which must be retained according to legal requirements and corporate guidelines.
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes features that implement all of 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 2007 system — such as Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word — also include features that support each stage in a document's life cycle.