Planning for Document Management and Scanning

When companies are in the planning stages for the implementation of scanning and document management systems, there are several technical infrastructure areas of focus that need to be considered. Most organizations will need to make an investment in their infrastructure to ensure program success and optimal performance. Below are some considerations:

•Storage – Storage planning is critical to provide adequate space and meet future growth requirements for the system. A typical 8 ½ x 11 page will require 50K of storage space. A typical 4 drawer file cabinet contains approximately 10,000 pages, and will require 500 MB of storage on a server. With these benchmarks, you can easily estimate the amount of storage space required. When performing these calculations, make sure and examine your document types to see if they have images, logos, pictures, etc. This will add to the baseline, and increase the amount of storage required. Test scanning of documents is always a good idea to see what the actual size of your image files will be using your scanning hardware of choice.

•Backup – An area often overlooked, a sufficient backup system will be necessary. There are many different philosophies on how to backup a system, but one thing is for sure, larger organizations with a large volume of paper will require a dedicated system for backup. Some options for small offices include CD/DVD, USB Hard drives or a network attached storage device at another location. For large organizations, tape drives and even tape changer systems will be required. Ensure that the device has the ability to backup the entire document repository.

•Network – If you are running your network on 10Mbit hubs, it is probably time to upgrade. Remember, all the facets of a document management system will be transferring large files back and forth between servers, client workstations, MFD scanners and the backup system. You want to invest in the fastest possible network infrastructure to ensure high performance.•Server – That old NT 4.0 server your brother gave you is not going to cut it. Processor speed is not that critical, and any recent server technology will serve well in this environment. Ensure that the server has at least 1GB of memory, and invest in a RAID Disk subsystem for fast access to the files, and redundancy.

•Clients – If you are still running Windows 95, it is time to get up to date. Any modern XP workstation will suffice, and if you have capture workstations that are doing intense document conversion processes (OCR), or are attached to high speed scanners, invest in fast processors and as much memory as you can afford.

Investing the time, resources and capital in a Document Management/Scanning system also requires a modern network to work properly. The investment in modernizing your organizations IT Infrastructure will provide a larger payoff in enhanced system performance, and confidence that the system will be able to grow to its full potential.