Documents exist in a variety of formats and locations. You probably have them in the various drives on your company’s computers, as Web pages, e-mail messages, in spreadsheets, word processing documents and more, not to mention on paper.

Use these guidelines (and then add to them) to begin creating a document management strategy from scratch.

Documents should:

• Exist in one place
• Have names that are easily understood and clearly identify what is in the document
• Have a clearly defined "Owner"
• Have a creation date and an expiration date
• Be secured
• Be mobile (available for a stand-alone laptop users via briefcase)
• Be identified as personal, draft, official, private, etc.

Your document management system must:

• Have quick and easy search capabilities
• Be Web accessible
• Control updates to shared documents (allow for versioning)
• Adjust to changing organizational structures
• Limit the number of "publishers" for "official documents"
• Control access when required