Patent ID: 8009315

Claim:
An information management apparatus comprising: an assignment unit that assigns regions on an imaginary plane for pages of at least one document that is output by at least two image forming apparatuses so that a single region is assigned to each of the pages; a receiving unit that receives a request for assignment by the assignment unit, and identification information that identifies the document; a notification unit that notifies the image forming apparatus of a coordinate value in the region assigned by the assignment unit, as the coordinate value by a predetermined code to be expressed on a document image of the page; a storage unit that stores, for each region assigned by the assignment unit, region information that indicates the region and the identification information, the region information and the identification information being stored associated with each other; and a search unit that, when a coordinate value is input, searches for the identification information associated with the region that includes the coordinate value in the storage unit, wherein: the imaginary plane is divided into partition regions of a size corresponding to a maximum paper size of recording paper usable by the image forming apparatuses, and an assignment sequence is set for each partition region; and the assignment unit, when assigning a region on the imaginary plane for a page of the document, selects an unused partition region according to the assignment sequence, and assigns the region for the page inside the selected unused partition region.