Information overload seems to plague our workplaces. Add to that the overreliance on paper-based information, and you have a cluttered office.
Organising this chaos is a struggle. But with hardware becoming cheaper and efficiency more urgent, document management may provide the answer.
There are several classes of document management. The more ubiquitous is document management systems (DMS) or electronic document management system (EDMS).
Both labour to classify documents in a central digital filing cabinet called a document repository. Here, documents are filed according to historical value and how they relate to each other.
Meta data (similar to a contents or index page) is supplied for each file to describe what it holds.
With the proliferation of the Web as a medium for exchanging documents, a new category called Web Content Management (WCM) was born. This does the same as DMS but only extends the paradigm to include Web-related documents, like publishing webpages on the intranet or internet.