Document Management describes the indexing, storage and retrieval of documents in an organized manner.

A Document Management System typically includes the following components: Imaging or scanning of paper documents; Indexing of documents using appropriate tags or keywords; Storage of electronic versions of the documents in a database, typically in image form, but possibly including an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) version to allow for search of document text; Conversion of documents from one electronic format to another (e.g. Microsoft Word to PDF); Retrieval, typically via simple, web-based lookup tools; and Destruction, should secure purging of documents prove necessary.