What is document management?

A document management system is a set of hardware, software and procedures that allows the efficient acquisition, indexing, storage and retrieval of documents in many different physical and digital formats.

But let's go back a few years in time, to the 1980s and 1990s, to find that awareness of these problems had already pushed hardware manufacturers and software developers to come up with solutions.

The cheapening of the necessary devices (personal computer, scanner, storage devices) and the proliferation of database and optical character recognition (OCR) software had opened up the possibility of creating solutions capable of dealing with the acquisition, indexing, storage and search of information for corporate environments.

Naturally only a few companies at that time could tackle comprehensive projects for the management of large volumes of information. Small and medium-sized companies, on the one hand, did not have the necessary budget and, on the other, did not manage a volume of documents that would justify such an investment.

The popularization of the Internet, advances in both hardware and software and the transition to an information economy created a very different scenario during the first years of the century, in which not only did small and medium-sized companies need to manage large volumes of information, but also hardware and software had reached levels of sophistication and efficiency that could meet these needs in an economically viable way.

Over time, these same needs became more sophisticated, and more advanced aspects such as version control, security, workflows or collaborative work on the documents themselves had to be incorporated.

Eventually, the development of cloud systems in the last decade has made the need to have specialized hardware and to install, configure, maintain and update document management software practically obsolete. Nowadays, most document management solutions offer at least a software as a service (SaaS) version, which makes it easier and cheaper for SMEs to incorporate digital work. These solutions also allow the company's document archive to be accessible 7×24, from anywhere and with any device, and always in compliance with legal and security requirements.