Electronic Document Management System - EDMS

^{Electronic/ Enterprise Document Management System - EDMS}

^{Share and Repository Browser (Alfresco Community Edition)}

^{Alfresco Software, Inc. ("Alfresco") is an enterprise open source software company focused on advancing the flow of digital business. The company provides a better more effortless way for people to work, making sure they have the information they need, exactly when they need it the most. The Alfresco Digital Business Platform is used to digitize processes, manage content and securely govern information. Alfresco helps over 1,300 industry-leading organizations, including Cisco, Delta Dental, Capital One, US Department of Navy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and NASA, be more responsive and competitive. Founded in 2005, Alfresco has it's U.S. headquarters in San Mateo, California and European headquarters in Maidenhead, UK.}

^{Best Document Management Software}

Alfresco

ALFRESCO WEBSITE

Find, edit, share and store your corporation's files with Alfresco.

^{Alfresco overview}

^{Alfresco is an open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system that manages all the content within an enterprise and provides the services and controls that manage this content.}

^{At the core of the Alfresco system is a repository supported by a server that persists content, metadata, associations, and full text indexes. Programming interfaces support multiple languages and protocols upon which developers can create custom applications and solutions. Out-of-the-box applications provide standard solutions such as document management, and web content management.}

^{As an entirely Java application, the Alfresco system runs on virtually any system that can run Java Enterprise Edition. At the core is the Spring platform, providing the ability to modularize functionality, such as versioning, security, and rules. Alfresco uses scripting to simplify adding new functionality and developing new programming interfaces. This portion of the architecture is known as web scripts and can be used for both data and presentation services. The lightweight architecture is easy to download, install, and deploy.}

^{Alfresco is an enterprise document management solution designed to enhance your company's productivity and workflow. It's ideal for businesses looking for an integrated solution for document management and content management. It offers a variety of features and tools to help you more easily find and access documents, edit files and share data. It is a mobile solution and offers powerful security to keep your corporation's most important data secure at all times.}

^{Among Alfresco's standout features are its workflow and collaboration options. You can easily share files with certain members of your team, route documents to certain individuals for approval or review, and communicate via discussion threads to keep co-workers apprised of current processes and style through project wikis, task lists, and activity feeds.}

Alfresco Overview

^{Using Alfresco for Document Management}

^{Today, the ability to organize and locate important documents, such as contracts and proposals, anytime from anywhere is crucial to an organization's success.}

^{With Alfresco, your team can experience leading edge solutions around Content Management, Enterprise Collaboration, Information Governance, and Process Management.}

^{Alfresco is an open source Document Management System (DMS) platform that can streamline your organizational operations and processes. It's highly customizable and can be easily integrated with your existing processes and applications, which reduces setup cost and time.}

^{Rapid development applied to Alfresco document management system}

^{An organization often has to manage a large number of documents, such as bills, transport documents, technical documentation, production orders and so forth. This large amount of documents would require a lower storage space and would be more easily retrieved if they were digitalized. For instance, bills coming from vendors could be scanned and converted to an electronic format, other documents could be created directly in a digitalized version, through some office applications or other information systems.}

^{When such a scenario occurs, there is the need to store several gigabytes of documents in an efficient way, indexing them through ad hoc criteria, which can change according to the document type. Moreover, they must be searched quickly and efficiently, that is to say, through specific search policies, like the navigation of a documents hierarchy, composed of categories and sub categories or by looking up documents using custom fields, such as the document title, author, creation date, etc.}

^{Another very helpful feature is the ability to search for a document based on its content, starting from a group of words to find inside the document.}^{Finally, since that gigantic quantity of data is strategic for a company, it is essential to create a backup of it, in order to ensure the restoring of the duplicated data in case of loss of data due to hardware failures or software malfunctions. What just described is normally part of a system called Content Management System (CMS).}

^{Every organization should have an information system including a CMS module or, as an alternative, it should add a stand alone CMS system if it is not supported by the main I.S., since its presence allows to take advantage of what described above.}

^{Nowadays, several CMS solutions are available in the market, some of these are open source products which provide a significant economic saving for a company, especially for the small to middle size ones. One of the most popular CMS today is Alfresco, which is available also with a free edition. This product provides all of the features reported in the previous paragraphs. Basically, it is a Java based web application, portable on many platforms, including Windows and Linux and its user web interface allows to administer, search and manage documents both inside the company and remotely, by simply using a web browser. Alfresco is composed of these main components:}

^{a CMS engine, through which it can store and retrieve documents}
^{a web interface to use to administer and look up documents}
^{a web services layer that allows external applications to connect to the CMS engine, without the need to use the Alfresco web interface}
^{a second web application, named Share, used to create ad hoc user interfaces, according to specific organization requirements, by developing the GUI and the business logic behind it; skilled Alfresco web developers are needed to create and maintain this part of the system.}

^{The main advantages of this solution are:}

^{no license costs are required, in case a company decides to choose the free Community Edition of Alfresco}
^{a powerful CMS engine to manage and search for documents}
^{a web services layer, extendable by writing additional web scripts executed through the engine; in this way, the product is very flexible and customisable.}
^{a fine Access Control List management (ACL), used to set the visibility and access level of a single document or documents folder, with the ability to restrict the access at user level or at group of users level.}

^{However, there are a few issues involved with Alfresco Share and it is time to draw attention to them:}

^{creating an ad hoc user interface starting from Share is costly, because it requires a deep knowledge of the product, as long as skilled web developers to realize what needed; in addition, each time a change is required to that part of the system, an external software vendor or a developer must be engaged in order to maintain the custom part}
^{documents often are stored along with their metadata, which is additional information that describe the document, in terms of author, title or further structured data such as the customer code, an item code, etc. This kind of information should be stored together with the document and they are helpful particularly when the user is searching for documents starting from these data.}
^{In most of the cases, this type of data is managed through other applications and it is typically stored in databases; consequently, it can be cumbersome to access this data from Share, which is connected to the rest of the Alfresco suite and has not been designed to access other systems.}

^{Starting from these limits, 4WS.Platform has been designed and developed; this product is a Java web application, as portable as Alfresco and it can be used to communicate with the Alfresco web services and interact with that CMS; in this way, the web interface must not be any more created using Share and consequently the costs and required skills involved with the construction of a custom user interface are dramatically reduced.}

^{Platform allows to create a set of panes that compose the new web front-end of Alfresco; the construction is realized via a series of wizards through which it is possible to graphically configure lists of documents, detail panes and related metadata, search panels, document version lists, document preview and upload panes and much more, including the administration of documents, in terms of access policies, users and user groups.}

^{These tasks can be accomplished in an easier way than with Share, without the need of expert technicians and with costs considerably lower. Maintaining this system is also cheaper and simpler, since neither external vendors are required, nor skilled developers.}

^{Platform is more than that: it was born as an open source tool to use to quickly create data centric web applications. Among the most important features of this product, there are wizards to create grids, trees, detail forms, Google maps, image galleries, code selectors, starting from database tables and optionally database queries expressed in the SQL language, in a way very similar to the classical Microsoft Access application, but with more strengths, like the web access and multi user capability.}

^{Moving from the data management focused on a database to the document management has been the natural step. Platform makes it possible to easily create forms showing a list of documents managed behind the scene by Alfresco engine and enhance that feature with the chance to fill in metadata by retrieving the values from a database. That overcomes the limit of products like Share or of custom applications developed with the same aim.}

^{From the perspective of the document management, the main benefits coming from the Platform + Alfresco adoption are:}

^{reduced costs when creating the web interface to use within the organization}
^{the ability to mix data directly managed by the CMS with data coming from legacy systems and databases}
^{the chance to create a web solution not limited to the document management area only, by means of a unique tool and a unique and uniform user interface}
^{user authentication and authorizations can be delegated to external systems, such as an LDAP Server like Active Directory.}

^{To sum up, within an organization is frequent to make several systems able to communicate and interact with each other, including a document management system.}
^{Integration activities and costs involved with data/document oriented solutions can be significantly reduced when combining Alfresco and 4WS.Platform.}

^{Additionally, this software is accessible on mobile devices. You can view content on these devices and even make changes. Access controls and on-device encryption are available to ensure documents and information are secure.}

^{Alfresco provides all of the necessary features for finding, editing and storing documents. You can open existing documents and edit them. Version-control options are available, allowing you to access and view the most recent and previous versions of a document. There are also document-imaging capabilities and the option to store your files and documents in the Alfresco cloud.}

^{The security of your content is important with this enterprise CMS. You can view all previous activity of a file and see who has accessed documents. You can set restrictions so only certain individuals can view, edit and delete a document. This prevents confidential data from being accessed from unwanted individuals. There is monitoring and auditing of documents and encryption of content to ensure nothing is accessed without the right permissions.}

^{Alfresco is an excellent choice if strong collaboration and security features are important to you. This solution offers many of the features we look for in a document management system as well as an enterprise CMS, including basic content management and social options.}

^{7 Powerful Advantages of Using a Document Management System}

^{There are people who personally prefer chaotic work stations, insisting that chaos fuel their creativity. While that may be true, it hardly works in a business environment where people are usually equipped with the right productivity tools to do the right jobs. This article tackles the benefits of managing your business documents through document management software.}

^{It happens even to the best of us. A document gets misplaced, and you spend hours looking for it, to no avail. Then, your brother or sister, friend or colleague tells you in their most dismissive tone: “Quit looking for it. You’ll find it when it decides to finally show up.”}

^{And guess what, they almost always end up right. The moment you stop looking for the darn document, just when you already forget about it, you find it sitting innocently on a pile of other documents, on your night stand, or other places you thought you've already turned upside down but never actually had, as if enjoying every moment of the little hide-and-seek it obviously beat you at.}

^{Now, this is a situation you can have a good laugh about if immediately finding the said document isn't a matter of life and death, or business-critical, one way or another. What if it’s that one document a team needs to get started on a stringently time-sensitive project? What if it’s something that can save a struggling company from costly litigation? Or a government-mandated shutdown, perhaps?}

This is where a document management system (DMS) becomes absolutely necessary.

^{What exactly is a document management system?}

^{According to iDatix, “document management encompasses the processes and procedures your organization uses as it pertains to capturing, storing, securing and retrieving information on a daily basis,” a process that can be simplified through the use of document management software.}

^{Document management software makes it easy for businesses to combine paper and digital files into a single hub, as physical documents, including checks and business cards, are scanned and digital formats are imported. File formats supported can range from Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, PDF files, and so on.}

^{BusinessDictionary.com cites an example on their explanation of a Document Management System : “the online banking section of a bank’s website that allows users to manage and access their monthly banking statements.”}

^{The basic components of document management software systems include:}

^{Document storage}
^{Check-in/check-out}
^{Simultaneous editing coordination}
^{Security and access control}
^{Search and retrieval}
^{Version control}
^{Indexing and classification}
^{Audit trails}
^Annotations

^{It’s more than just going paperless}

^{Aside from helping keep trees upright to protect the environment from health and economic hazards such as pollution, landslides and flooding, employing a cloud-based document management software solution comes with a host of advantages.}

^{Below are seven of them:}

1. Document/file repository

^{Cloud-based document management systems serve as a central repository for all your important documents that can subsequently be accessed, viewed, changed and shared with colleagues. No more wasting hours upon hours of precious time frantically looking through stacks of folders to find a single document.}

2. Document/content security

^{When documents are not managed, the possibility of important information being exposed to the wrong people is considerable. Vital, sensitive information falling into the wrong hands can bring irreversible damage to a business. Document management software solutions let you safeguard confidential business information through rigorous security policies and role-based access control (RBAC) where authorized users alone are allowed to view certain files or documents.}

^{In the case of disasters like fire or flooding, cloud-based DMS ensures your business-critical data are kept intact, not wiped out from the face of the earth.}

3. Anytime, anywhere access

^{As is the case with cloud-based software solutions, web-based DMS affords users the ability to access files and documents anywhere, anytime, regardless of device used, which is particularly handy when collaborating on projects with team members who are on the go or located remotely.}

^{4. Integration with third-party software}

^{App integration is a nifty capability that eliminates redundant data input and allows seamless information flow between disparate platforms. Not only does it save you time and effort, it maintains data integrity and accuracy as well. Some DMS even support email integration, affording you the ability to directly send files and documents to customers, colleagues, and vendor partners.}

5. Better organization

^{With tags, categories, subcategories, and metadata to mark your files and documents, they become easier to organize, locate, and retrieve for future use. A search using the appropriate keywords can yield results in a matter of seconds.}

6. Time/cost efficiency

^{Employee efficiency is a time-saver. Business-wise or otherwise, time saved is money saved. Add to that the fact that keeping and running a document management system can be done at absolutely no cost (for those with free options).}

7. File sharing

^{With DMS, users get to share and collaborate on files and documents with colleagues, regardless of their location. They control who they share documents with, and files can be shared through links, published on the web or sent as password-protected files to third-party stakeholders. With the audit trail functionality, they know who has viewed or edited certain files or documents, also critical when unearthing process errors and inefficiencies.}