When deciding whether/how/when to drive your office towards a “less paper” state, you’ll need to be looking at Electronic Document Management, or EDM. We often hear the acronyms EDM, ECM, ERM, EMR and others, but electronic document management (EDM) is probably what the medium sized business needs to get familiar with and move towards when looking for efficiency in records management.
EDM is the management of digital documents. These documents can be images, audio, video or other formats. Remember, anything that represents permanent evidence of, or information about past events is a record. Because these digital files are records, we have to manage them just like we manage our papers.
EDM software suites help us manage these records. All of the chores we did with our paper records can be done by EDM software. These old filing and records tasks we used to do with manila folders are done electronically now and often have new or different names.
Old Name What was/is it? New name
Printing Creating the document for filing or use Capture
Labeling Labeling the record to ease filing and retrieval Indexing
Pulling/Retrieval Searching for a file in a cabinet or on a shelf Querying
Filing Order The way records were filed. Alpha, Num, T N/A
Most of the other tasks and terms are called by the same names in EDM; retention, destruction, chain of custody, record series and more are pretty much the same.
The point of EDM software is that it can automate many of the labor intensive tasks involved in records keeping. Capture, indexing, filling, retention scheduling, interoffice mail, destruction and more can be scheduled and scripted tasks done for you through the magic of computers. Now the management of a record from birth through to destruction can be automated and done electronically.
The best of EDM software can be programed to manage how your employees work with information. EDM can drive the workflow in your organization.
A document management system stores documents, but even more importantly, it provides easy access to documents, whether it’s through a search mechanism, or a document browser interface. Document management software will support the easy mapping of an organization’s standard document types and information about the documents (metadata) into a repository.
EDM software can also provide a powerful easy to use mechanism to control who can access which documents, whether they have permission to edit documents, and whether the documents may be emailed out of the library. Best in class EDM will also provide access to documents though familiar interfaces, either Web-based or from within common office productivity applications.
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