Document Management

Document Management

Name

University of Phoenix Online

BSA/375 Fundamentals of Business Systems Development

Instructor

29 Aug 2005

Document Management

Introduction

When planning to implement a document management system, there are many factors to consider. First you have to consider how you want to store your documents, be it electronic, paper format, or both; you have to have adequate storage space. Next you have to decide whether you are going to attempt to archive old documents your organization has in storage. A major factor in determining the format you are going to save your documents in is to decide the length of time you wish to keep you documents and the amount of space you have in which to keep your documents. If you are going to keep your documents in a paper format you have to keep in mind the amount of space it will take to store them. Another consideration when determining storage of your organizations documents is how you want to organize your documents be it chronologically or subject based, you need to decide what works best for your organization. And lastly you have to decide how you are going to take those old documents, created before computers, and turn them in to a format which can be stored electronically. There are many different formats which can be beneficial when keeping an archive of documents. There are many reasons why documents need to be managed. First and foremost they serve as a historical log of where your organization came from and they will help shape where your organization can go in the future. Documents can be a reference of how past projects were worked and offer practical solutions for issues which come up in all projects. Keeping documents can be beneficial for every organization, from keeping records to showing where the organization can go, documents play a part in the every day workings of every organization.

Format

One of the first things you will need to consider is what format you intend to keep your documents in. There are many different formats from which to choose from, and one of the test you will have to use to determine which format you will want to use is are you going to what to change information with in the document. Buy that, will you want to use some of the content from a past document to help shape future documents, or will you want to change any of the information contained with in the document to keep with the changing times. Another thing to consider is what format you want to distribute the document in. There are two major formats from which to choose from, the Microsoft Work document and the PDF document, short for Portable Document Format, a file format developed by Adobe Systems (Webopedia). But what exactly is PDF? PDF is a publishing standard used by standard bodies around the world for more secure, reliable electronic document distribution and exchange (Adobe). Each format has its benefits and downfalls. To determine which format to use you have to decide you have to decide what you want your users to be able to do to the document. If you want them to be able to make changes to what you have posted, than your best choice it is to choose Microsoft Word. But if you want them to only be able to view what you have you would need to choose to use a PDF document.

Another consideration when determining what format you wish to use is the software used to view the document you wish to distribute. If you were to choose Microsoft Word, every person who needs to view the document will need to have a program, such Word, which would enable them to view and make changes to the document you distribute; one of the problems with this is that Microsoft Word has to be purchased in a package called Microsoft Office, which can be expensive. On the other hand if you were to use the PDF format, you can post your documents and the only program which would have to be obtained is a free program called Adobe Acrobat. Which method you use can depend on how you intend to distribute your documents to your employees and or your customers. Another consideration one can use when deciding which format to use is how much space there is to store your documents. For most companies, documents must first be written in a Word format and than converted into a PDF format. So for this reason it can be less space efficient, because you have to keep two copies of every document. Another problem with using a PDF format is the fact that PDF uses a fixed format, which means that a document formatted in the PDF format will never fit well on the screen (Ertl).