What are (Electronic) Document Management Systems?
EDMSs, or Document Management Systems (DMSs) as they’re also called – the terms are used interchangeably, are commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software package cousins to DBMSs. Whereas DBMSs are designed to store structured data – principally data elements and data records – relieving application programmers of data storage and retrieval tasks, DMSs store, retrieve and manage unstructured information objects – files, text, spreadsheets, images, sound clips, multi-media, and compound documents – giving non-IT end-users rich storage and retrieval of all of them without anyone in the end-user’s organization having to do any programming. An IT staff’s involvement is to configure and install the package, train the users, provide help-desk support, and keep the servers running smoothly. In this sense, DMSs are more like word processing and email packages. What are some of these DMSs? Like their DBMS cousins that range from Microsoft’s Access to Oracle’s mainframe products, DMSs range widely
