Integrated Document Management - The Essence
The term electronic document management (EDM) is already passé. The current term in vogue is electronic content management (ECM). EDM is only a small part of ECM. Integrated document management (IDM) has taken EDM to a much higher plane through use of many new integration technologies. Document integrated management has been possible because of many cutting edge technologies.
Integrated document management systems use these technologies to enable the integration of all aspects of electronic document management. The purpose of integration is to enable companies to effectively store, archive, and retrieve documents in any format used by them. This includes multiple formats.
The scope of this article is the essence of integrated document management through the technologies used to enable better integration of document management.
Information overload in companies and difficulties in document management because of this issue has forced the development of facile application programming interfaces (APIs). The issue is further compounded because different companies use different formats to store documents and also use different applications to manipulate these documents. A company could use multiple applications and document formats too. It is in such a context that various integration technologies had to be literally evolved a la necessity is the mother of invention. These technologies can be used to effectively resolve the multiple formats and applications issue. Web services, Java adaptors, and XML are some of these cutting edge technologies. They have been successfully used to accelerate the process of integration to a great extent. Another feather in the cap is federated repository management (FRM). FRM has been used by Oracle Corporation to great effect to pull data into a database that is structured. With FRM, a company can unify unstructured or even structured data right across the board at enterprise level. Venetica, a product, supports bi-directional access to unstructured data in document management and even to other systems, such as those provided by disparate vendors. So, now many options are available to customers and system integrators. Another aspect is that many other integration disciplines, unrelated to EDM or ECM, are seamlessly undergoing mutual transition. This has helped in effecting their relevance to EDM or ECM. Convergence of technologies is the latest trend. It has been realized for sometime now that no single system can provide access to all the information that companies may have, wherever it may be located. In such a context, enterprise information management (EIM) is the latest watchword doing the rounds. Three technologies have evolved to help make convergence a reality in future. One is enterprise information integration (EII). The second is enterprise application integration (EAI). Extract, transform, and load (ETL) is a feature used in data warehousing. It is the third technology. However, these technologies still have their own limitations. Another area in the development of an integrated document management system that has been seen as contributing significantly to integrated document management is standards development. Let us hope all the above make convergence of technologies a reality.
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