Sep 23 2009
Bulk Import And Export A Must For Document Management Systems
Over and over again, we are contacted by prospective customers who want nothing more than to shake off the shackles of their existing records management, document imaging, version control, document workflow, and collaboration tools and find a better document management system. They’re irritated with their legacy system’s functionality, interface design, and the “customer-no-service”.
Having experienced the shortcomings of their existing systems, they are easily lured to one with a user-oriented design, broad range of solutions, and that is backed by the helpfulness of everyone in the organization, most importantly the support department.
However, making the transition to a new document management system is not always a clearly defined process. Many document imaging or management systems on the market today are engineered to support bulk import of documents while completely neglecting support for exporting files and supporting data.
There are plenty of reasons why companies need the means to convert from a document management system – aside from simply being displeased with the application. Several of these other examples that have impacted our customers include company mergers, document turnover at the end of a project, permanent archival to other media formats, selling a business line, and more.
Having flexibility in the system to allow for bulk export is crucial. For prospects and customers with issues converting from their proprietary legacy systems, this warning comes too late.
However, for anyone in this market researching solutions, I have some telling cautionary signs to watch for that could lead to challenges down the road:
1. Storing documents with file extensions that differ from their source application
2. Backend database requirements outside of the mainstream relational database products such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, and MySQL
3. Stores data in a flat-file database “like” system
4. Proprietary compression or encryption techniques are used
5. Product does not offer an API (Application Programming Interface) or SDK (Software Developer Toolkit)
6. Built-in viewer technology that displays the images using non-standard file formats
7. Bulk export tools are not built into the base product
Knowing these warning signs upfront can safeguard that your data will not be held captive in a document management system. This can generate a large amount of additional work and headaches that will only complicate the conversion process. We have worked with some not-so-lucky customers whose only alternative for converting from their legacy system is to manually print each document (to paper or PDF) and then to re-key in the index information.
Other customers have provided us with samples of their encrypted files or their database that no one remembers the password to asking that our professional services team run decryption cracker technologies in hopes they can free their data.
Please do not let this happen to you!!
