Best practices for document management systems

I recently received a question about best practices for electronic document management systems using Word 2003. While I use Word 2003, I have only used it in combination with Sharepoint as a document management system, and the docs I write in Word are usually short, internal documents, not external technical manuals. Coincidentally, I've heard that IT departments are using document management systems in concert with their CMDB. Text-based documents, drawings, architecture designs, all these documents are important to an IT department and any business organization. It makes sense that the CMDB would be related to a document management system, although I won't get into any discussion about whether each document is a Configuration Item (CI) or not. ;)

My experience with document management is Documentum with FrameMaker, and we don’t currently do much co-authoring with people in the rest of the company. So I’ll admit first off, this request for information is outside my personal knowledge. But, I do like a good research question and I gathered together some reading items.

Here’s a summary of what’s found in this article about putting together a document management system using Microsoft tools. Your environment may vary widely from an accounting-type environment, though, but I thought these were decent overarching goals for managing documents, and I expanded on a few of them based on my experience with document management systems in general.

1. Determine what documents get the “document management treatment.” Create limits on what is stored and maintained in your system so that you know what’s in there and what’s not, and you also limit maintenance and a bulging file system. Will you scan and store images of paper copies?
2. Classify or group your documents together. Some EDMSes do this for you using document type, but you might also want other criteria for easy search and retrieval later. This approach also allows you to assign more than one classification to a document.
3. Store the files efficiently to make retrieval easy. Your EDMS might do this on its own with little input from you.
4. Retrieve as needed, using versioning if desired, which leads to the next step. Realize that indexing and keyword searching are crucial tasks for retrieval. Be sure to train users to properly tag documents for fast and efficient retrieval. You may have to create a taxonomy using standard terms for the system.
5. Managing and tracking documents allows for the type of collaboration where one person can check out a document to make revisions. Other collaborative activities might include activities such as participating in active discussion groups, tracking issues associated with customer engagements, maintaining common contact information for subject matter experts on a particular document, and even assigning tasks related to a particular document. Tracking and versioning also allows for storage and retrieval of documents from a point in time which may be helpful historically.

For research like this question, one place I like to do searches is answer.google.com. There was one relevant Answer for someone who was looking for an analysis of document management software. It’s long but comprehensive. I realize you might be well past the evaluation stage for a DMS, but you might get a look at what features are offered. You can also use blogsearch.google.com to search only for blog entries on a given topic, although that particular search method did not offer much on this particular topic.

Going beyond Google, I did a search using www.bloglines.com to search for blogs about "document management systems," and the best I’ve found so far is www.docuvantage.com/blog. Another site that offers a wide range of case studies and white papers is The Gilbane Report at http://www.gilbane.com/.

There are also lessons learned from the doc management trenches at Hewlett-Packard. It appears the author is Susan Charles, an Information Research Analyst at Hewlett-Packard. She describes the implementation of an internal document management project at HP. She discusses the challenges of the project, and what she sees as the lessons learned.

In addition, here’s a case study from a university setting. I haven’t read through it completely but it might offer some advice.

As with many best practices in technology, you want to analyze first and implement second. Spending more of your time in the up front planning and definitions will pay off when you go to populate your system with documents.

Anyone else have some advice to offer? Feel free to post a comment, or use the trackback URL to write about it in your own blog and refer to this entry.