61 Etere Document Management

Document Management (Do.Ma.) is critical for many enterprises, especially when the amount of documents raises the cost of ownership to high levels. Reducing paper documents and cataloguing by digitizing and archiving them into an SQL database allows an integrated enterprise information system. Information stored in databases is made available to users in various sectors efficiently.

Etere Document Management can associate many files to one "virtual document", allowing you to refer a group of documents to a user. A "virtual document" is a container that collects several documents. You can associate a group of physical documents with a unique container, and the same document may be related to several containers. Containers are connected to digital objects (e.g. contract scheduling details, scheduled events, personal data, account invoices, existing assets, receipt faxes, etc.), either acquired by a scanner or directly inserted, and stored into Etere's SQL database.
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In the diagram above, for example, a PDF document could be a copy of the contract charge that will be scheduled, the BMP file is the contract's digitalized invoice acquired by a scanner and stored in the SQL database, the same documents (PDF and BMP files), at the same time are associated to the client personal data management code of the scheduled contract.

Besides Adobe PDF documents, you can also store MS Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents in the DoMa database, providing the ability to preview files and indexing capabilities for full-text search. For Adobe PDF files, the installation of PDF IFilter is required.

Every inserted document has its information, some of which is automatically assigned, and others can be input by the user who inserts the document. Document Management supports any file format (e.g. bmp, jpg, tif, pdf, doc, txt, zip, etc).

Topics in this chapter:
Integrated Do.Ma. (launched from within a module)
Simplified Do.Ma. (launched from resources)
Standalone Do.Ma. (launched from the main menu)

Note
It's worth mentioning that all files are managed with the Do.Ma. Tools are stored in a dedicated database different from the production database; this database also contains other files such as Asset Thumbnails, EDL Picons, Memory Bookmarks, etc.