Paperless Office Systems

Whether you are a small business or a large enterprise, you probably have heard these buzz words floating around.  Two of these words "Content" and "Document" are very different. That should be our first clue.

It's true, the paperless office concept is now a reality for many companies but what's all the fuss about content management? is it just a fancy word for document management?

Actually, the two terms are very different in scope. ECM (Enterprise Content Management) entails a broad range of technologies and methodologies. This deals with documents and data.  When you think of documents think of traditional paper records. When you think of data, think of data you enter into a database , like accounting or HR software for example.

Most of the time that data you enter, comes off of paper and is typed into a system. Well, nowadays we have the technology to capture that  data from the piece of paper and enter it into those systems for you. Pretty amazing huh? but its true and being done everyday.

So, ECM includes processing, accessing, managing, measuring, storing, integrating, preserving, and delivering information supporting key organizational processes through the data's entire life-cycle. It enables searches within the structured and unstructured data of  documents according to business rules established at the capture stage.  It's more than just managing documents 

With technology moving so fast, It is a never ending process to gather and analyze data from business documents and databases in order to produce the desired reports needed to make critical business decisions on profits and losses. That is the bottom line.

 An (EDMS) electronic document management system, however, is specifically designed to manage all documents that are or have been turned into a digital format, usually PDF or MS Office documents and need to be used in various business processes across the enterprise. EDMS software allows you to capture, store, manage, and track electronic documents instead of shuffling physical paper around.. Managing can mean being more organized and easily accessing documents. One might even go as far as to tweak the flow of documents using a feature called workflow and is included in all of the major EDMS  offerings.

However deep into the word management you go,  digitized paper-based information can be captured in various ways depending on how the document is created. The best policy is to leave all digital documents in digital format without printing them. Click here to learn more