
What are ‘document’ and ‘document management?
Document management tasks and functions
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- Over 30 billion original documents are used each year in the United States.
- The cost of documents to corporations is estimated to be as much as 15 percent of annual revenue.
- 85 percent of documents are never retrieved.
- 50 percent of documents are duplicates.
- 60 percent of documents are obsolete.
- For every dollar that a company spends to create a final document, 10 dollars are spent to manage the document creation process.
Saving and storing
Check-out, check-in, locking
Version control
- No version control, the system is storing only the last version of each document. In this way we are not able to get back the former versions and the history – of course, sometimes it’s even not important.
- Major versions only: The versions are marked by positive integers (1, 2, 3, …). After saving the document it gets a new increased version number, and the several versions can be accessed by different permission sets (current version vs. former versions. We use this option when it’s insignificant to make any difference between published and draft versions (working copies).
- Major and minor versions: The versions are marked by numbers formatted as X.Y (1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, 2.1, …). We use this option when it’s important to make difference between published and draft versions (working copies). The published versions can be accessed to read by a wide range of users, but the drafts are hidden from most of them, only the editors can see these ones.
Approving and other workflows
Permission management
- During the preparing phase only the preparers can see the documents (and create/edit them, of course), everybody else are denied even to read them.
- During the approving phase even the preparers cannot modify the documents, but the approvers get permissions to read.
- After approving the signers get access to the documents, but nobody is able to edit their contents.
- etc.
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