Sunday, October 17, 2010

Benefits of Document Indexing

A document is a broad term that may refer to something in the form of text, video, audio, or image. Documents basically contain information. Written documents come in the form of reports, minutes of the meeting, letters, catalogs, e-mails, and memos. Oral documents can be in the form of MP3s, radio clips, or analog signals. Video documents can be found in video clips or television shows. Managing all the documents in a certain organization is quite a challenging task and it requires analysis, retrieval, and storage capabilities. Documents are used as decision-making support for organizations. However, if the information cannot be located easily, then this makes the whole process useless.




Document indexing is the process of putting tags and marks on the documents which allows the documents to be found immediately. This type of indexing offers a lot of benefits for the whole organization and this may include improvement of information distribution. In this way documents are created and shared faster within the organization. These items are easily tracked within the organization as well. Documents are easily backed up at the off site location for any disaster or emergency that may take place. Indexing also makes the document retrieval from its storage location a breeze.
Other benefits are improved security in the document because it can be restricted only to authorized users. It makes the search process faster, improved and flexible because data or information can be retrieve by just using a word or phrase in the document. It also reduced the storage cost for the document because it is usually done digitally compared to using the physical storage. And it also offers remote access for documents even off site or on site locations. The management team can make decisions easily and share documents within the organization when they needed it.
Using document indexing offers a lot of potential benefits for the whole business such as improved decision making, preserving the organization's knowledge and information, improving the flow of information, and gaining competitive advantage among others. However these benefits are difficult to measure because it still depends on the whole management team how they managed and used the documents they have for their decision making and business process.
Documents in the business will only serve their purpose if the needed information is located easily in the system. This can only be achieved if proper document indexing is done with the documents.
Malcom thinks that a lot of companies could benefit from document indexing. This is an easy way to get your information organized without having to hire another secretary to do the job for you. The days of manually sifting through paper and other pieces of information are gone. Electronic searches have replaced those days. Another interesting tool that business managers may want to investigate is data center virtualization.

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