ELO Digital Office

IT systems and solutions designed to facilitate an organisation’s documents storage and retrieval – commonly called Electronic Document Management & Content Management Systems (EDM and EDCM), are rapidly maturing offering organisations very significant document storage and retrieval process efficiencies.

Document storage and retrieval is of vital importance to organisations because most of the valuable business information that an organisation possesses is in the form of documents including business forms, reports, letters, memos, policy statements, contracts, agreements, etc.

Moreover, most of the important business processes in any organisation tend to be based on, or are driven by, document flows.

Documents comprise a key component of organisation’s knowledge and capability, and ELO Digital Office, a leading EDM application can improve the ability of the organisation to utilise this very important information. On introducing the ELO Digital Office application into an organisation, the major value in the immediate term is derived from merely storing paper documents in an electronic form. In the longer term, the EDM capability provides the key to enable quick access to this information repository thereby enabling the analysis of the organisation’s knowledge to improve productivity and performance.

What is a “Document”?

A document may be defined as a snapshot of some information or data and can:

1. incorporate various complex information components;
2. exist in a number of versions and in multiple instances across an IT network;
3. source additional information from other related documents;
4. be subject to collaborative online updates / revisions (as related documents are updated);
5. have a complex structure, containing various data types such as video and voice components; and
6. be accessed and modified by more than one person in collaboration (subject to user permissions).
   
   Each and every organisation faces an information deluge. Whilst there are obvious physical constraints in managing the workflows and the resulting documents in the organisation, the costs of their physical and systematic storage and users’ access to the information contained, is also ever increasing.
   
   The EDM technology offered by ELO Digital Office enables organisations to make the required, and often desired, structural changes to established and much dated methods, that empowers them to use their information far more effectively and efficiently at a far lower cost than the traditional high labour cost manual methods.
   
   Fundamentally, organisations themselves can be viewed as information processing systems or units, which in turn need to interact and communicate with other organisations. This further highlights the importance of their communications methods. Each of us has, at some time or another, expressed our disappointment in the persistence of the paper-based document. With the progressive and widespread introduction of EDM systems into various market segments, a paradigm shift in the focus for paper-based documents is occurring. Paper’s role is already altering significantly. Rather than paper serving mainly as the storage medium for documents, it is increasingly acting primarily as a user interface option.
   
   

   Document & Information Storage

   Technology developments enabling the diminishing reliance upon paper based documents includes digital image processing, large and relatively low cost electronic storage capacity, multi-media tools and documents, high bandwidth communication channels, electronic printing, electronic mail and fax, and improved techniques for information and text retrieval through keywords assigned by an indexing process. These technologies are proving invaluable for applications such as workflow management, improved communication between and within organisations, training and education, various records management, and internal reporting.
   
   

   Electronic Document & Information Retrieval

   Information retrieval is driven by the selection of documents from a collection, according to the presence or absence of keywords assigned by an indexing process. All content defining words are indexed as keywords. Queries and requests based on the keywords assigned to documents, result in a list of system selected documents ranked in order of likely relevance.
   
   

   Document Transmission

   EDM functionality typically required for business delivery of electronic documents includes:
   Authorisation - assuring that the correct user is accessing the documents
   Authentication - assuring that the "digital signature" of the user is valid
   Encryption - coding and decoding documents for security
   Filtering - automatically routing messages or documents according to their content
   
   

   Document Management

   Status Reporting - Who has a document? What is its recent activity?
   Access Control - Who "owns" it? Who can read it? Change it?
   Version Control - What is the current version? What previous versions are still needed?
   Retention Management - What are the legal retention requirements? Corporate policy requirements? How do we destroy paper and electronic versions?
   Disaster Recovery - How and where are backup copies kept? What are the recovery procedures?