Previous Chapter: Part 6 - The Knowledge Base
Every department in every company in the world is going to have to deal with documents. Where a long time ago, this was all done on paper – and yes I know that in some types of companies this is still the case – now most companies use digital documents. The big idea behind the digitalization of documents was that it would be a lot easier to share documents, work on them simultaneously with more than one person and store and archive them more easily.
The problems with the document digitalization quite rapidly followed the actual introduction. Because it was so easy to share, store, etc. all of a sudden a lot more documents popped up. Then came the version issues. Who was working on what version of the document? And then it was time for the storage issues. Where could you store all of these documents, and all of their versions, so that people could actually find them when they needed them?
Throughout the years there have been quite a lot of document management systems that tried to provide answers to these problems. All had their strengths, all had their faults. The biggest issues were that they focused solely on documents and where/are notoriously hard to integrate with other systems. Besides providing the standard document management answers, SharePoint now tries to provide an answer to the DMS problems too.
By Ronny Gabriels, Functional Analyst and ex-.net Solution Architect