Introduction

SyfoDOC is much more than a simple document management system – it provides a workspace for every office and mobile staff to work collaboratively. SyfoDOC allows third-party integration via the industrial standard platform - web services. To meet the needs of different industries, SyfoDOC is built on Microsoft platform, providing your customers and partners a single platform to communicate effectively.

SyfoDOC offers users a familiar Microsoft Outlook interface, making it easy for user to learn. Also, it is enabled with the auto-fill-in solution in order to minimize the time required for data entry and thus maximize productivity. With our searching and indexing servers, most document types can be search easily while the layout and design is totally customizable.

A major paradigm for SyfoDOC is its component-centric design. The technologies adopted to leverage your system can be easily rescaled to cater for business units of varied capacity.

Major Component of SyfoDOC

Document management systems commonly provide storage, versioning, metadata, security, as well as indexing and retrieval capabilities. Here is a description of these components:

Metadata

To include the date the document was stored and the identity of the user storing it. The DMS may also extract metadata from the document automatically or prompt the user to add metadata.

The resulting extracted text can be used to assist users in locating documents by identifying probable keywords or providing for full text search capability, or can be used on its own. Extracted text can also be stored as a component of metadata, stored with the image, or separately as a source for searching document collections.

Integration

To integrate document management directly into other applications, so that users may retrieve existing documents directly from the document management system repository, make changes, and save the changed document back to the repository as a new version, all without leaving the application.

Capture (Optional as a plug-in with third party solution)

Using scanners or multifunction printers (MFP). Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software is to be used, whether integrated into the hardware or as stand-alone software, in order to convert digital images into machine readable text. I tend to make this component being an optional plug-in as the cost of OCR can varies in wide range. So we may just let the customer to decide whether or not to have it, and what level of OCR plug-in they expect.

Indexing

To track electronic documents. Indexing from keeping track of unique document identifiers to a more form such as providing classification through the documents' metadata or even through word indexes extracted from the documents' contents. Indexing exists mainly to support retrieval. One area of critical importance for rapid retrieval is the creation of an index topology.

Storage

To store electronic documents. Storage of the documents include management of those same documents; where they are stored, for how long, migration of the documents from one storage media to another and eventual document destruction.

Retrieval/ search

To retrieve the documents from the storage can be simple, but should consider to support the user to specify the unique document identifier, and having the system use the basic index (or a non-indexed query on its data store) to retrieve the document. More flexible retrieval allows the user to specify partial search terms involving the document identifier and/or parts of the expected metadata. This would typically return a list of documents which match the user's search terms.

Distribution

The published document for distribution has to be in a format that cannot be easily altered. As a common practice in law regulated industries, an original master copy of the document is usually never used for distribution other than archiving. If a document is to be distributed electronically in a regulatory environment, then the equipment tasking the job has to be quality endorsed AND validated. Similarly quality endorsed electronic distribution carriers have to be used. This approach applies to both of the systems by which the document is to be inter-exchanged, if the integrity of the document is highly in demand.

Security

Document security is vital in many document management applications. Compliance requirements for certain documents can be quite complex depending on the type of documents. Our document management systems should have a rights management module that allows an administrator to give access to documents based on type to only certain people or groups of people.

Workflow

Our DMS will mainly have two modes: (1)Manual workflow requires a user to view the document and decide who to send it to. (2)Rules-based workflow allows an administrator to create a rule that dictates the flow of the document through an organization: for instance, an invoice passes through an approval process and then is routed to the accounts payable department. Dynamic rules allow for branches to be created in a workflow process. A simple example would be to enter an invoice amount and if the amount is lower than a certain set amount, it follows different routes through the organization.

Collaboration

Documents should be capable of being retrieved by an authorized user and worked on. Access should be blocked to other users while work is being performed on the document.

Versioning

Versioning is a process by which documents are checked in or out of the DMS, allowing users to retrieve previous versions and to continue work from a selected point. Versioning is useful for documents that change over time and require updating, but it may be necessary to go back to a previous copy.

Publishing

Publishing a document is sometime tedious and involves the procedures of proofreading, peer or public reviewing, authorizing, printing and approving etc.

Web-based

To achieve the anyone anytime anywhere concept of participation, the DMS have to be able to operate on both internet and intranet.

Supports multi-languages

Have to support basically English, Chinese (traditional and simplified) UIs and search/index functionalities.

e-Signature

In recent year, the e-signature function is quite hot in the market especially in China. The customers may expect something like a company chop image being imprinted on a document. Some of the local fax server vendors have already started providing customization for this. We may put in an e-signature at the very end of the documenting process when it is ready for publishing.