Topic 2010: Electronic Document Management with Open Source

Do you know how many office documents your organisation is currently storing? To what extent are they still active or available for view only? How much storage is consumed by those non-active documents and may you still open or edit them? Lothar K. Becker, Managing Director of .riess applications, states: ‘Our feasibility studies on alternative desktop office products include the analysis of an organisations’ document inventory. During this process we frequently notice a major information gap at the corporate IT department: size, age and relevance of the document inventory maintained are widely unknown.’ However, the major role of documents serving as information carriers of business processes comes to the fore as soon as Collaboration Features of office products are used more frequently – either sequential or even in real time.

Documents are sent increasingly via E-Mail in an uncontrolled way. Reliable information about the document owner and the latest version of the document is not available. In case a template is missing, the document might also be converted into a completely new format which is beyond repair for the next user. By accident the document might also be changed by the office product via the file storage format. Metadata such as author, origin or document history may be lost. A multitude of identical copies are stored on different drives across the organisation. ‘In the context of our analyses we frequently notice that more than 50% of the inventory consists of non-living documents’, says Becker.

In order to identify those documents which reached the end of the content lifecycle, a systematic analysis and professional document management is required. Otherwise the IT department cannot be sure whether or not a document can be archived or even removed completely. This may result in unreasonable efforts occurring in the course of office product migration or archiving processes with a negative impact on the quality and performance of document based workflows.

"Business and administration rely more and more on the use of Document Management Systems in order to exploit this significant potential in increasing productivity while reducing costs. Nowadays organisations of a certain size are not necessarily bound to expensive, proprietary products anymore, i.e. Microsoft products. On the contrary: sophisticated and comparable Open Source products are now available. ‘As a consequence, the potential for cost savings is not consumed by substantial licence fees and expensive support contracts,’ highlights Becker.

If you are interested in releasing the cost saving potential inherent to your document inventory, please do not hesitate to contact us either by phone or mail:
E-Mail: box@riess.de
Subject: ‘Document Management’

We look forward to paving your way towards saving those superfluous costs associated with your document management.