The scanner is an important component in a document management system. It is used to convert the paper documents into images and store in the document management system. Conversion of the existing paper documents to digital form is an important task in order to use the document management system efficiently.

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Only a few of the organizations might have implemented the document management systems. Organizations that look for the conversion process should be getting the scanner too to integrate into the document management system. It is better to ignore the existing paper documents and scan the incoming documents alone to implement the system right away. Unless it is critical to your business, you need not use the scanner in the document management system to scan all the piled up paper documents. If you implement right away, you need to train the staff to scan all the incoming documents and upload in the document management system before they start processing the documents. This will improve the efficiency of the system. The backlog documents can be scanned anytime in parallel while the DMS is in operation.

Automatic scanning of the documents to digital form is possible with certain model of the scanners. An organization can buy such scanner to integrate it into the document management system. This would enable automatic document feed for the scanner. It is possible to configure the document management system, so that the documents scanned by the scanner, can be organized into categories in different folders.

Usually OCR software is also used in conjunction with the scanner to extract text from the image created out of the paper documents. This text extracted out of the image is stored against the image in the database. This enables the search module in the document management system to locate the exact document based on keyword search.