The definition of document management is as follows:
Document management is about managing documents and also covers the processes involved around documents, such as capturing, storing, finding, editing, updating, preserving, sharing and securing documents.
People often refer to document management as a document management system, or DMS for short. With such a DMS, organisations manage the processes and documents mentioned above. Also read what a document management system is?
Document management terms
There are several appearances of the term document management, including document management, information management and enterprise content management (ECM). The terms document management and document management are simply synonyms in English and in Dutch. The term enterprise content management is a more abstract form of document management because it substitutes 'documents' for 'content'. Content is much more general than just documents, so it also includes other formats such as images and videos. However, nowadays document management systems also handle these different formats, so this distinction is not really an issue these days.
Other concepts such as knowledge management, asset management, contract management, quality management and record management also involve documents. In these cases, a document management system used or other specific (vertical) software.