What is Document Management?
Document Management is the capture and management of documents within an organization. The term document management is used to imply the management of documents after they were scanned into the computer. Today, the term has become an umbrella under which document scanning and imaging, workflow, text retrieval and multimedia fall.
The trend toward designing information systems as document centric, where the document becomes the focus, not the application that created it, is expected to bring document management to the forefront of computing.
Typical systems involving document scanning have the user scan in the original paper document, and store the image of the document in the document management system. The image is often given a name containing the date and the user is often asked to type in additional "tags" in order to make finding the image easier.
Slightly more advanced document management systems also perform an OCR on the image, storing the text along with the image. Although most OCR systems are notoriously inaccurate, even a few correct words scanned off the page can eliminate the need for the user to type in their own tags.
Once the document is stored, it is typically retrieved using an application that is aware of the way the tags (or scanned text) and image are related. That way when you search for "invoice", opening the document will in fact open the original image.