Until a few years ago, an ideal office used to be filled up with papers, files and paper racks. It was huge job to arrange such files in racks and maintain them. There was always the possibility of fire or other means of damage that would result in constant loss of those documents. If any of these occurred to take place, the files would be irrecoverably lost which cannot be repaired. There was always the need for a constant solution to this, and the result was the emergence of “Document management”, which has resulted in a paperless environment in most of the offices nowadays.

It might sound simple, but to make an office, paperless demands a lot of trouble settling related to industrial needs. It is all about managing your documents in the way so that it is within your reach whenever needed in the needed form without wasting extra time and space. The evolution of computer has annexedto the simplicity of office work, and the process of do document management is possible just with the aid of a computer. Document management has grown into the top priority in offices where cost cutting has become inevitable, since the overall price of implementing the electronic document managing system would persuade to be less when compared to purchasing papers, files and racks. Also the space needed to keep these racks may be saved. Imagine, trying to find out definite paper from thousands of papers racked up in your shelf. Not just would this be time wasting, it would be frustrating for the person seeking too.

The electronic document management system is a computer-driven system where custom made software tools are used to capture, process, index, keep, recover, distribute and dispose of the documents. The documents could be in any paper format, which can be transformed into electronic files. The system does contain the capturing of documents through scanning, bar coding and optical character recognition.

The majority of the corporate have shown a trend towards converting all their documents into electronic files, thus reducing the impact of the physical paper on the environment. These electronic files, which are transformed from paper, can be kept on computers or other storage devices and may be accessed from anywhere. They can be transferred to across the world through internet. This enables the flexibility of not having to carry papers and also saves them from being destroyed by fire or other means of destruction. The safety aspect is another advantage of these electronic files which cannot be overlooked. Electronic document management systems can be best implemented in companies where there is a enormous heap of documents, which would be too difficult a task to manage and also keep track.