EDMS [Electronic Document Management System] - Introduction

Good morning Africa, compliments.... I hope the festives were great and fun filled?

While the festivities where going smoothly, I was busy having a rough time with a friend whose file was destroyed by water 😥, it was too bad to happen at this point but all the same it wasn't his fault, the organisation should be blamed since the file was in their possesion... Well thanks to keeping copies of documents we were able to solve the problem at the end of the day, this brought my attention to the fact that despite the organization made use of computerised systems in carrying out some functions, they still made use of paper files and had a huge stack of these files.

I'd say it's a good thing those files got destroyed because they're now left with no option but to get a better way to keep their files to avoid something similar in the nearest future.

This brings me to talk about

**Definition**: EDMS is a software system for organising and storing documents of various kinds. Basically, this system is popular amongst document management systems and is a generally a type of document storage that helps it's users organise digital documents rather than paper.

This systems provide a central storage for large volumes of documents and files in digital formats and is majorly efficient for retrieval of these documents and files.

- Primary Function -

Managing electronic information within an organisation's workflow.

For efficient classification of documents, EDMS's make use of meta data for document storage such that the meta data surrounding a document will provide quick and effective access to key details in relation to what the user has requested in a search.

History of EDMS
IN 1898, Edwin Grenville Seibels devised the vertical file system,

This started out documant management systems with arranging files in stacked cabinets. The fact that this brought a great change in file organisation around the globe cannot be ignored, but it's space consumption was too high to be ignored as cabinets began to consume too much space in organisations, and as a result there was almost no space for workers in some organisations. In 1939 Biels Photocopy Service came up with a system of keeping digital copies of documents in Buffalo, the system used a microfilm to photograph, modify, store and reproduce unlimited copies of documents. In 1980 the computer technology came into being and development of serves in centralised mainframes made file management a lot more easier, though it was highly unstructural but it was a lot better than the cabinets that used up physical space.
Finally in the 1990's the first EDMS was built with a user interface by Biel and was called Biel's document service, till date different more friendly and even cloud based systems have come up from the IT industry.
Samples
Few EDMS's available include:

EDMS	PROVIDER LINK
Mayan EDMS	mayan-edms.com
Synergy	synergisSoftware.com
MaxxVault	maxxvault.com
OpenKm	openkm.com (web based)
DocStar	docstar.com
Master Control	mastercontrol.com

Functions:
EDMS has many functions which can be simply categorised into three major functions which include: Version Control, Security Control, Meta data Capture.
The Security control function allows the system restrict data access by users, >i.e Only users given permission to access files will be able to as defined by MGDPA. The version control function of the system allows users perform various actions on documents in the system for exaple a user can add and designate documents with the system. Lastly, the Meta data capture: This section is in charge of appropriate data capture.

This would be all for introduction, in my next post, I'll be explaning how EDMS's work and also how to work with a few of them.

Thanks for following, Kindly drop any question in the comment section.