“Document management” was previously the domain of librarians and nerds in the filing room (no offense!). However, with the deluge of email, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, invoices, reports, and even more, it’s now a problem that everyone has to deal with.
Most versions of Windows (and other operating systems) use a file and folder based system for storage and retrieval of information. This correlates with the real-world filing cabinet with folders world system that people were used to dealing with in years gone by — along with archival rooms that required their own division in order to retrieve last week’s memo on casual clothes Friday.
Well, time has kicked on, and we’re dealing with far too much information for this to be truly effective, printing just isn’t possible (or really a good idea) for most data — and the risk of error rises continuously as more information is pushed into the system i.e. which folder did I store that in? What did I call that document? Have I modified it since it was sent to me via email? How can I find that document I wrote 3 years ago?
It’s a tough problem to solve — there’s a variety of solutions: structured storage — which is more traditional, providing detailed metadata; you can tag each item — much more the way of the internet, but can lack precision; use full-content searching, again, can be effective, but by itself can require wading through a ton of results in order to find what you’re looking for.
What we’re trying to do with Benubird, is to use a combination of all of these methods — to offer you a much more efficient method of retrieving your info — and superseding the old file and folder approach in the process..
Along with this, we’d like to think that our user-interface goes along way toward making this happen. All going well, we should have a beta version ready for you in about a month.
