Amid the swirl of downsizing, reengineering, and process improvement, document management has become a topic of water cooler conversation. More important, document management is increasingly being implemented as a better way of accomplishing an organization's mission. Organizations are realizing that their documents aren't just text, but are procedures that allow efficient operation. Desktop Publishing vs. Document Management Desktop publishing deals with producing a document, and is characterized by the terms formatting, spelling, writing, generating text, document structuring , and word processing . Publishing focuses on a single document, though the publishing process may be repeated several times to generate several documents.
Document management deals with groups of documents.
It deals with controlling many documents so that the production, distribution, transmission, review, archival, reuse, and maintenance of the documents is finally possible, orderly, and efficient. The managing of documents is characterized by the terms text retrieval, electronic distribution, workflow , and configuration management . The document management concept is a result of the need to use information over and over without repeating the costs of originating that information. The Scramble To meet the document management need, the marketplace has been providing increasing numbers of products. Companies have been scrambling to develop or acquire expertise related to document management.