Electronic Document Management Systems （电子文档管理系统）.pdf

Electronic Document Management Systems The purpose of an Electronic Document Management System is to provide a central repository for documents. An electronic document management system allows for: • Secure environment for document storage; • Immediate web based access to documents by authorized personnel from any location; • Multiple users can access the same document simultaneously, at anytime; • Management of versions of documents to minimize inconsistency and redundancy; • Increased speed of storing, retrieving and modifying documents; • Reduction of paper, space and staffing requirements associated with paper filing systems. An EDMS system offers a means of adding documents to an online repository and associating properties with those documents to make them easier for users to locate and retrieve. It also provides a method to check-out and check-in documents so that additional versions may be created and retained without overwriting previous versions. It facilitates collaboration by allowing all parties to simultaneously locate and use the most recent version of an electronic document. Additionally, the system supports a wide variety of document and data formats. Users may upload, search, view, check-out and check-in documents according to the user group to which they belong, or the access rights specifically granted by the individual that added the document to the EDMS system. Usually access to an EDMS is provided based on user groups. Figure 1 shows a schematic of an EDMS system from a user perspective. There are two basic tasks: adding and retrieving documents. Adding documents involves first creating an electronic version of the document to be uploaded. In some cases the document may already exist on the user’s computer. When paper documents need to be entered in an EDMS they must first be scanned to