With the growing notion of Green IT and the need to achieve paperless office drives companies to look for an IT system which can help them reduce the paper usage in office, while increasing users productivity by the way of converting and managing papers in electronic form. The job to identify and implement such a system often gets assigned to the IT department, which then reaches out to various IT vendors to evaluate their solutions. Each vendor today refers their solutions using different terminologies confusing the IT managers or the business decision makers and throws a unique challenge in front of them to first decide on what exactly are they looking for, a DMS, RMS or a full-blown ECM? While the first might be dirt cheap, the later might require deep pockets to acquire, implement and maintain.While not one size fits all, its important to first zero down on the type of solution an organization is looking for and then invite the right vendors to demonstrate their product features, implementation capabilities and future support (I’ll talk about the methodology to evaluate vendors in my next article). Here is the list of few common abbreviation used commonly in IT industry to achieve electronic storage and management of papers, which might be helpful for organizations to pick the right title for the solution they require: Few common abbreviations
- DMS: Document Management System
- EDMS: Electronic Document Management System
- RMS: Records Management System
- CMS: Content Management System
- ECM: Enterprise Content Management
- WDMS: Workflow and Document Management System
- CDMS: Compliance and document management system
- DCS: Document Control System
Though some of the abbreviations listed above might sound very similar and refer to similar characteristics, it’s important to understand the narrow difference between them and identify the right solution for your business needs. I’ll try to briefly explain the basic characteristics of these terminologies and the narrow difference between them: DMS: A DMS is often referred to a system which manages electronic documents like office documents, pdf and images, having basic library functions like add/edit/delete document, check-in/check-out, versioning, audit trails etc. EDMS: An EDMS is not very different from DMS, though it specifically narrwos down the defination by adding the ‘electronic’ word into it. This terms is more practically used while referring to the need of a basic document management system. RMS: Records Management System is expected to be the enhanced version of DMS, which also offers records management features, wherein users can declare certain documents as ‘formal records’ of the organization, archive them for a period on it for meeting the regulatory and compliance requirements.
