Remember how an average office looked just 30 years ago? Chances are there were entire rooms set aside for paper document storage, or because of space constraints and security concerns those important documents were kept at an off-site location, making them irretrievable when needed quickly. File cabinets were the norm, taking up valuable square footage and necessitating entire staffs to keep track of all the paperwork.

Today's offices look and function quite differently thanks to electronic document management systems. The world is run by computers now, so the transition from hard copy to electronic documents has been a natural and absolutely essential one. Electronic systems allow companies all over the world to capture, share and collaborate on documents in mere minutes, if not seconds, greatly decreasing both costs and the element of human error. Here is a short overview of such a system's basic components.

The main jobs of a CED management system are: capturing, storing, indexing and retrieving, although more comprehensive systems allow users to effectively accomplish more tasks such as managing work flow and collaborating on a document from virtually anywhere.

--Meta data recording and storage: Incoming and outgoing documents are automatically tagged as to the date and time sent, who stored it, and so forth.

--Capture: The technology used in scanners allows hard documents to be transferred into electronic format, and CED management captures this data. In most cases, the software also allows for the easy transfer of computer-based documents into the system, so that materials can be processed, retrieved and stored through the company's network.

--Indexing: One of the trickiest parts of electronic document sharing and storing is keeping it all organized. CED management keeps track of unique document identifiers and may also provide quick classification using meta data information.

--Retrieval: Users can either retrieve a single document through the use of a keyword search or an entire index to find multiple documents. This feature is a real time-saver: imagine how things used to be done in the "old days:" it may have taken literally days to search through hard files to find a single needed document.