The Datamax Thinking Blog

Educating, collaborating, and sparking ideas for maximizing the technology that matters.


Exposed: The Low Cost of Today’s Document Management

Any business whether it’s healthcare facilities, legal firms, financial services or educational institutions, has to deal with an inordinate amount of documents.  When digging through a dusty file cabinet for a case study or client information, at the back of any file clerk or assistant’s mind is the question “Isn’t there a better way?”

Anyone who deals with paper on a regular basis has dreamed of having their paper information on their computer.  Now that the price of hardware space has decreased, the possibility of integrating an electronic document management system is more appealing than ever. 

Here are a few facts:

A four-drawer filing cabinet holds about 10,000 pages of paper. A 100 Gigabyte Hard Drive holds information from 200 filing cabinets. Documents can be organized into logical electronic files that can be retrieved through convenient keyword searches. Documents’ privacy and security are improved through password-protected access. Your information is backed up regularly to create a disaster recovery strategy. You can optimize the amount of information stored by reducing the color and resolution of documents and changing the file formats to PDFs (Portable Document format) and TIFFs (Tagged Image File Format)