The Challenges of Document Management

Organizations have historically struggled with getting accumulated knowledge into the hands of workers who need it. Even when someone captures important organizational knowledge in a document, letting others know of its existence and making it easily available to them is no simple task. In the paper-based world, organizations have had librarians, clerks, and assistants filing, categorizing, and cataloguing information. Without this costly and labor-intensive step, paper records were nearly useless.

With the advent of personal computers and networks, document authors have largely taken over the filing role, storing their documents in a folder hierarchy on network servers. This practice raises four problems:

Difficulty enabling group collaboration on documents. In most organizations today, several people contribute to a document during its life cycle. Documents often have creators, editors, reviewers, and approvers, and organizations usually have established processes that must be followed in publishing information to readers. Although all popular network OSs support access control lists to limit who can read or write to a document, and to lock documents so that other people cannot make changes while they are open, users need more flexibility. They need the ability to do the following: