Software Articles

Business documents are retained for several purposes such as complying with statutory requirements, providing decision support information, recording history, demonstrating compliance with regulations and meeting document-discovery needs in litigation. Retaining electronic documents for long periods faces some special problems.

It's document indexing that makes the tremendous speeds of document retrievals possible. As you may have noticed, Internet search engines retrieve documents relevant to your specific query from among billions of documents on the Web in less than a second.

Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS) provide overwhelming advantages over paper-based document management. It's in this context that document imaging comes into the picture these days, converting remaining paper documents into electronic ones.

It's distribution that really makes documents powerful. When your prospective customer receives your sales letter, or when warehouse personnel receive the order dispatch advice, or when the shop floor manager receives the day's production schedule, your business gets moving.

In the U.S., document discovery in litigation has its own practices. Efficient document discovery can save large sums of litigation costs. Even in other countries, efficient document "discovery" can substantially enhance the chances of success in lawsuits.

Document classification means sorting documents in a way that makes it easier to locate them later. For example, you classify a document as a sales order, as an order from a particular client, for a particular product and of a particular date.

What's the difference between backup and archive? The major difference is that an archive consists of primary data while a backup is secondary data.

Documents have to be stored not only during their current periods but for years thereafter (forever in some cases). Statutory and litigation requirements and preservation of history, for example, make such storage necessary.

Sensitive business documents can be stolen and sold to competitors. Virus attacks can wipe out entire hard disks. Spyware can steal your identify and access your bank account and use your credit card.