Collaboration, records management, and workflow are just some of the features in current electronic document management software. We examine your options.
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Contents 
Objective
DocuShare
Hummingbird
DocBanq
Interwoven
SmartLibrary
Trim
Specifications
Sample scenario
Editor's choice
About RMIT |
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The latest electronic document management systems (EDMS) provide a wide range of solutions to these common yet critical questions.
Modern EDMS are able to deal with the wide range of electronic records. When combined with effective records management capability, an EDMS can provide a whole-of-document lifecycle solution from creation to filing, versioning, retrieval and display through to controlled disposal, ensuring the availability of the most recent version of documents and a document history (crucial to most organisations).
Over and above the capability to produce better productivity by having well-organised access to both electronic and physical records, there are compliance issues that organisations need to address.
The seven packages submitted for review covered a wide range of features and capabilities providing effective document management solutions for organisations from small businesses through to large enterprises. Several of the products were components of overall enterprise-level content management solutions offering extremely powerful capabilities to all aspects of the business.
Several of the products reviewed provide a workflow capability that enables you to track business processes and see how they relate to documents throughout the lifecycle.
While your reviews on EDMS options are solid they fail to take in to account the biggest users of these packages in Australia are Engineering biased.
Most of the packages reviewed I found found to be nearly useless in an Engineering Environment.
One, named after a bird, can not store more than one electronic file to a profile (essential for storing the native and a image file of the signed original) and can only manage one to one relationships in its database which is not good for correspondence let alone a drawing with say 100 equipment tag numbers to be related to it.
I suggest you also look at products such as Documentum, Filenet (both the McLaren add-on), ProArc and Assai to name a very few.
The other issue is that engineering is also moving rapidly away from CAD centric applications to datacentric design tools and your reviews make not mention of the future in this regard. Look at, for example, SmartPlant Foundation and Aveva products.