What are the essential, desirable, and bonus features of a great Document Management System (DMS)?

Some of the points you might want to consider before selecting a DMS

Intro/Preface

This article is the first of two tackling major decision points when selecting your perfect Document Management Software (DMS). Is there such a thing as perfect DMS? Well, it depends on your definition of perfect. For you, the ideal DMS for you may be the one improving the efficiency of processing information, hence improving the productivity of your employees. Another area for you may be increasing regulatory compliance, potentially keeping away headaches from you. Ideal DMS for you may facilitate better collaboration between employees, which is a great way to increase the organization’s competitive edge. Superb DMS also provides easy and faster searches and retrieval while providing enhanced security of documents, improves backup and recovery, reduces physical storage space, and minimizes office materials costs. That is a lot to consider, and a DMS close to perfect may be the one with the right mix of features.

Just as a reminder, there are three “how” to consider while looking for a DMS:

• How it stores, manages, and tracks electronic documents,
• How it handles documents creation, modification, sharing, organization and archiving,
• How many additional functionalities, such as imaging and workflow, are offered?

The above may translate into three levels of functionalities. When considering features of a software product, we may look at three groups of characteristics:

• Essential: without these features, a software product doesn’t make sense,
• Desirable: a list of expected qualities and typical requirements for a particular type of software,
• Bonus: a set of features that makes the software product stand out.

How about now to offer an answer to the question: What are the essential, desirable, and bonus features of a great Document Management System (DMS)? Let’s break it into manageable chunks and provide more insight.

Essential features of a DMS

When searching for a solution for managing your documents, these are fundamental features to look for:

• Single domain for digital content,
• Employees collaborate simultaneously,
• Content management for all files,
• Strong search capabilities,
• Security to protect stored information.

There are many sources of documents, and the DMS must provide means to funnel documents from physical or digital origin to a single space, available for all employees and sometimes customers. It is imperative to provide the environment for simultaneous employee collaboration and work on documents content. Content management should expand to any file type without restrictions upon size. It is much needed to provide means to search and intuitively retrieve documents, including full-text search and metadata search, preferably respecting the document context. Security of documents is a crucial demand, and it must be by software design.

Desirable features of DMS

Furthermore, when finding a solution for managing your documents, these are some attractive features to expect from high ranking DMS:

• Version control and roll-back
• Audit trail
• Automatic check-in/check-out
• Vault for documents storage
• Access control
• Classification and indexing
• Mass import
• Integration with the document editor
• Remote access

Navigation between document versions and going back to a previous one if needed is a must-have feature for top-notch DMS. An audit trail provides details of what changes and by whom happened during the document lifecycle, making records of each step in a document transaction. Automatic check-in/check-out is amongst the preferable DMS features to provide seamless and simultaneous collaboration on the same document. Documents storage vault accommodate a safe place for all digital content of your organization. Access control implementation must be secure, configured, enforced, and audited from within DMS itself. Document indexing is the process of associating (or tagging) documents with keywords. Classification helps to categorize different documents. Features such as mass documents importing make possible handling of increasing volumes of documents. To further increase the usability of DMS integrations with document editors is a valuable feature. With the evident trend toward the hybrid workplace, the need for remote document access is even more essential.

Bonus features of DMS

Finally, there are some useful features you may want to have in your preferred DMS, and some of them are:

• Digital signature support
• Scanning support + OCR
• Management of forms (templates)
• Workflow (process) support
• Email connector
• Incoming and outgoing mail management
• Sending email from within the system
• Calendar/meetings support
• Rich customization options

The use of digital signature is to verify approved documents, and it provides means to verify the identity of the signee and the document integrity. Scanning and OCR features make the bridge between physical documents and their digital representation for faster processing and retrieval. By their nature, document templates fall into document management, so any DMS with this feature will provide a consistent look for all documents based on templates. Your documents exist in their life cycle, and extending functionalities with workflow (or process) support is a natural evolution of high-end DMS. Communication with the outside world often relies on email, so handling both incoming and outgoing emails with DMS, comes as a practical feature. Look at the option to send emails from process activities, also. Preparing materials for meetings, sharing time-table, making and distributing minutes is valuable feature to manage information sharing. Last and not least, rich customization options available within the administration panel, where power users can modify settings, is functionality that characterizes first-class DMS.

Outro/Conclusion

When considering options for your document management system, you may want to recognize a set of features and compare candidates by objective criteria. Given a three-level set of features is not conclusive. Presented and described functionalities may serve as a starting point toward narrowing your choices in your quest for DMS that is perfect for you. In the following article, you may read about purchase decisions and benefits when implementing DMS, as well as what you might want it to do.

About the Author

Damir Divkovic has been implementing document solutions for over a decade. He is enthusiastically contributing as a consultant and designing training courses. His involvement/background in engineering provided him the opportunity to develop creativity, analytical and problem-solving skills. Likes to innovate.