What is Electronic Document Management (EDM)?
Any organization be it a company, an administration, a trade, an association, ... has a multitude information that can easily be found and consulted.
If more and more of this information consists of digital documents, there are still many documents circulating in paper form.
It is to meet the needs to dematerialize, classify, find, secure and distribute the documents that the Electronic Document Management solutions (EDM) are proposed.
GED‑en‑ligne is the easiest EDM solution to implement to meet these needs both for a large number of users in a company and for a small working group.
Many years of experience and many types of implementation make this EDM solution very easy to deploy both in 'web' mode or with a windows application in LAN.
EDM use cases
Office EDM
GED‑en‑ligne office allows all administrative documents to be processed up to A3. Documents can be digital files from applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, desktop publishing but also digitized documents such as bills, purchase orders, quotes, medical records...
Technical EDM
The specificity of the EDM proposed by GED‑en‑ligne technical is to be able to process and display large format documents, as plans.
For this type of document, rigorous monitoring of changes -version, index, status- as well as their interdependence in the case of a configuration management requires a more elaborate data structure.
Finally, unlike the office EDM where paper production is less and less necessary, the technical EDM requires the taking into account the paper production because the "scale" representation remains essential: on a liner, during construction of a power plant or a residential tower... That's why it is very important that the production of document folders either an integrated function to the technical EDM solution.
Deployment of EDM
When setting up an electronic document management, it is necessary to identify the functions to be covered.
The contents
The heart of the solution is the contents that will be kept in the solution.
This may be:
- Digitized documents with a scanner. There are functions that allow you to associate with the image of the document of the defined attributes either by automatic recognition (OCR), or by input during the indexing,
- distributable documents, standardized as PDF files,
- native documents, created with your applications as a word processor (doc, docx), a spreadsheet (xls, xlsx), a CAD such as AutoCAD (dwg); then we talk about dynamic GED, which ensures the preservation of the image of the document but also its design data.
GED‑en‑ligne allows to manage all these formats and even to ensure the automatic association of the native and its equivalent available as DOC/PDF or DWG/PDF.
Indexing of documents
This phase consists of assigning keywords to documents from their contents. Most often it is the user who defines the keywords to associate according to a number of pre-defined criteria.
In some EDMs there are also automatic indexing functions that use data such as document characteristics -date-fields- or its original folder make the job faster.
GED‑en‑ligne has these two indexing modes and can even make an analysis of the aspect of the document for example automatically calculate its format, the type of content (monochrome or color) to facilitate its subsequent distribution.
Sharing and securing document
To make access to documents easy and secure, a EDM must define users and groups of users with differentiated rights for consultation, addition and modification, administration. Often, profiles can be displayed with authorizations for certain commands like printing, tracking changes and change of status (workflow). GED‑en‑ligne has all these possibilities and can rely on the management of the Enterprise Directory(LDAP).
Documents must be stored on a medium that is appropriate for the volume and access time required. A validity date can be defined to automate the archiving of documents.
The benefits of EDM
An organization implements a EDM solution for:
- structure and secure his information for efficient and easy access,
- dematerialize paper documents to reduce or eliminate storage space,
- improve the quality of the information and their access,
- allow multiple users to work on the same documents simultaneously,
- have a traceability of access to data and documents as may be required by regulation,
and this brings users:
- quick and comfortable access to information,
- common procedures for sharing documentation,
- the guarantee that the documents can only be accessed by the authorized persons.
Platforms supporting EDM
EDM solutions can be offered on different platforms with a windows-based user interface or an interface within a web browser on a computer, tablet or smartphone:
- solution hosted in the public cloud
- solution hosted on a private cloud server
- deployed solution in the corporate intranet/extranet
- solution installed in client/server mode with windows interface
- single windows solution
- portable solution, on DVD, blu-ray, for example to broadcast a Base to a partner.
With GED‑en‑ligne you can switch from one platform to another at any time with the simple copy of a system folder!
