University of Zambia web based document archiving

Abstract

Organizations in this digital age deal with a large number of papers in their day-to-day activities. Much of this paper is legal or confidential documentation, and it is a statutory requirement that they be preserved for a pre-specified number of years. Statutory or otherwise, paper documents need to be sorted, searched, accessed, copied, modified, access controlled, audit trailer, Corporations of all sizes have increasingly come to realize that document archiving can add value to the organization far beyond mere speed of retrieval by enabling users to retrieve.[1] This paper presents the design and implementation of a web-based document archiving and management system customized to serve the needs of an organization. The system is designed to replace a paper-based process that has gradually became unmanageable due to the increasingly large volume of documents that are handled in organisations and the need to distribute the documents across different departments or offices. Features of the new systems include online archiving of documents, download and upload and a secure mechanism for web access of documents ,searching , auditing.Organizations produce piles of documents, images and other information electronically. The location of this information is a time consuming task. Users tend to file papers and to save documents in folders on their own computers. Nobody knows what information is across the organisation and what information is needed.