Document management system

What distinguishes a DMS from file storage#

Almost any system can store a file and give it a name. Five things separate a document management system from a shared drive, and an organisation evaluating one should check for all five rather than the first.

Enforced metadata. Fields that cannot be left blank at upload. Optional fields decay to blanks within months, and a metadata model of blanks cannot be reported from.

Version control with an unambiguous current version. Not just a history, but a clear marking of which version is in force and which are superseded. Work done to a superseded document is the most expensive documentation failure available.

Configured approval. A defined path a document type must clear before it can be relied on, with the approver, the date and the approved version recorded.

Retention with disposition. A rule attached to the record class, with an explicit trigger event, that raises a review rather than deleting silently.

An audit trail that records reads. A log of changes cannot tell you who saw a document before it was disclosed, which is the question an investigation actually turns on.

Where the term gets used loosely#

Vendors apply "document management" to products spanning file sync, collaborative authoring and full enterprise content management. The useful test is not what a product is called but whether it can answer, for any document, which version was approved, by whom, on what date, who has read it since, and when it is due for disposal.

Related terms#

A DMS is narrower than enterprise content management, which spans archiving, capture and records across many systems. It overlaps with but is not the same as records management, which governs the end of a document's life rather than its whole lifecycle.