Glossary

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Barcodes
Barcodes on mailed forms allow for the automatic recognition and filing of returns.

Business Process Management
Activities performed by organizations to manage and, if necessary, to improve their business processes.

Compression
Used to reduce the storage space needed for pictorial information. These applications allow the compression of any kind of date for transfer.

Computer Output to Laser Disk (COLD)
Used to capture, archive, store, and retrieve data such as accounting reports, loan records, inventories, shipping and receiving documents, and customer bills. These systems are typically implemented to replace paper creation and microfiche solutions.

COLD systems usually work by capturing data from print streams and storing it on hard drives, storage area networks, or optical disk drives. The data is then retrieved via web browsers or fat clients COLD systems are part of enterprise content management.

Content Management
A set of processes and technologies that support the evolutionary life cycle of digital information. Digital content may take the form of text, such as documents, multimedia files, such as audio or video files, or any other file type which follows a content lifecycle which requires management.

Content Management System
The practices that facilitate operational storage management. These include the principles that guide ILM; the storage management tools and practices; database management practices; system performance and monitoring; system configuration; capacity planning and business controls. Business controls generally include chargeback, costing and P&L-related metrics.

Database
Used for the direct storage of documents, content, or media assets.

Data Warehouse
The main repository of the organization's historical data, its corporate memory.

Digital Optical Media
CD (CD-R for write-once, read-only Compact disk, CD/RW for read-and-write Compact Disk), Digital Versatile Disk (DVD)), MO (Magneto Optical), and other formats can be used for storage and distribution, or in jukeboxes for online storage.

Document Management
A computer System (or set of computer programs) used to track and store electronic documents and/or images of paper documents.

Digital Asset Management
A form of enterprise content management that consists of management tasks and decisions directed as successfully meeting opportunities and threats in the dynamic business environments by effectively ingesting, annotating, cataloguing, storing, retrieving as well as the distribution of the company’s digital assets in such a way that the overall objectives of the company, its clients and society will be achieved (van Niekerk, A.J. 2006. Allied Academies, New Orleans Congress).

Digital Preservation
The management of digital information over time.

ECM
Enterprise Content Management is the technologies used to Capture, Manage, Store, Preserve, and Deliver content and documents related to organizational processes.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)
A set of standards for structuring information to be electronically exchanged between and within businesses, organizations, government entities and other groups. The standards describe structures that emulate documents, for example purchase orders to automate purchasing.

Enterprise Application Integration
The uses of software and computer systems architectural principles to integrate a set of enterprise computer applications.

Enterprise Portal
Enterprise Information Portals are one of the most popular ways in which enterprises can allow their employees and customers to search and access corporate information. It is a single gateway for users, such as employees, customers and company’s partners to log into and retrieve corporate information, company history and other services or resources.

Handprint Character Recognition (HCR)
This refinement of OCR converts handwriting or lettering into machine characters, but does not yet give satisfactory results for running text. However, for defined field content, it has become very reliable.

Imaging
The action or process of producing images, animations, 3D computer graphics, or any other spatial representation of a physical object.

Indexing
Refers to the manual assignment of index attributes used in the database of a "manage" component for administration and access.

Information Lifecycle Management
The practices that facilitate operational storage management.

Input Designs (Profiles)
Both automatic and manual attributing can be made easier and better with preset profiles. These can describe document classes that limit the number of possible index values, or automatically assign certain criteria. Input designs also include entry masks and their logic in manual indexing.

Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR)
ICR is a further development of OCR and HCR that uses comparison, logical connections, and checks against reference lists and existing master data to improve results.

Intranet
A private computer network that uses Internet protocols, network connectivity, and possibly the public telecommunication system to securely share part of an organization's information or operations with its employees.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
This converts image information into machine-readable characters. OCR is used for type.

Optical Mark Recognition (OMR)
Used for checkboxes for example, reads special markings in predefined fields with very high accuracy. It has proven its value in questionnaires and other forms.

Portable Document Format (PDF)
An intelligent print and distribution format that enables the platform-independent presentation of information. Unlike pure image formats like TIFFs, PDFs permit content searches, the addition of metadata, and the embedding of electronic signatures.

Records Management
The practice of identifying, classifying, archiving, preserving, and sometimes destroying records.

Tagged Image File Format (TIFF)
A file format for mainly storing images, including photographs and line art.

Web Portal
A site on the World Wide Web that typically provides personalized capabilities to its visitors, providing a pathway to other content. It is designed to use distributed applications, different numbers and types of middleware and hardware to provide services from a number of different sources. In addition, business portals are designed to share collaboration in workplaces.

Workflow
At its simplest, workflow is the movement of documents and/or tasks through a work process. How tasks are structured, who performs them, what their relative order is, how they are synchronized, how information flows to support the tasks and how tasks are being tracked.