Document Scanning Blog

By allowing users to store documents in a structured, digital environment, document management software helps small business owners to be more organized and flexible in running their business.  By including metadata to describe the contents of each document in the system, automated document management software provides much-needed structure and hierarchy for important documents, and puts them into a more intuitive workflow for user accessibility. 

Some of the latest document management programs are so sophisticated that they can automatically add Meta tags to office documents.  Known as “auto tagging”, this process works by dragging a document scanning  file into a folder that allows it to “inherit” the metadata information from other documents in the same folder.

Software programs such as FileHold will store and manage nearly every type of file, but even more importantly it can also search these documents for specific text and index them accordingly.  Supported documents include any Microsoft Office format, plus similar programs like Lotus, WordPerfect, Corel, Freelance and others.  It will also work with HTML documents and PDF files.

With so many employees “touching” a file, and sharing administrative rights, it may seem like revisions would be difficult to manage. However, document scanning management software can maintain a virtual paper trail, showing who viewed or changed it and when, and better yet, it will also retain all versions of the document so an earlier version can be recovered. 

Images can also be stored in a document management system, and they can be stored in their original, or native, format.  While it is recommended that users convert images to PDF files for optimum efficiency, it isn’t necessary to do that.  Just like text documents, images are indexed using metadata tags that include important keywords and phrases pertaining to the image.