White Paper Abstract:
If your company is considering investing in electronic document management software (EDMS), you may feel a little overwhelmed by all the options available. Not only do you need to find the best product to meet your functional and budgetary requirements, but you also probably need to find the product that best fits with your IT infrastructure. Traditionally, document management software is purchased and then installed and implemented on a company’s servers and workstations. In recent years, a few document management companies have begun to offer hosted document management software where your documents reside on a server external to your facility and you access the system via the internet.
The purpose of this white paper is to provide a comparison between the internally deployed and hosted approaches. There are advantages and disadvantages to the two approaches, so we want to provide information to help determine which approach makes the most sense for your business. Hosted solutions have become most widely referred to as SaaS(1), Software as a Service, so we will use “SaaS” to describe hosted solutions in this paper. Other widely used terms for SaaS include Cloud Computing and Hosted software. Since there is no common term for software installed and deployed internally, we’ll refer to these systems as “internal.”