VERSION CONTROL SYSTEM (VCS)

Abstract

VCS used to track and store electronic documents/images of paper documents. It commonly provides storage, versioning, metadata, security, as well as indexing and retrieval capabilities. Here is a description of these components.

Metadata: Metadata is typically stored for each document. Metadata may, for example, include the date the document was stored and the identity of the user storing it. It may also extract metadata from the document automatically or prompt the user to add metadata. Some systems also use optical character recognition on scanned images, or perform text extraction on electronic documents. The resulting extracted text can be used to assist users in locating documents by identifying probable keywords or providing for full text search capability, or can be used on its own. Extracted text can also be stored as a component of metadata, stored with the image, or separately as a source for searching document collections.
Integration: Any document management systems attempt to integrate document management directly into other applications, so that users may retrieve existing documents directly from the document management system repository, make changes, and save the changed document back to the repository as a new version, all without leaving the application. Such integration is commonly available for office suites and e-mail or collaboration/groupware software. Integration often uses open standards such as ODMA, LDAP, WebDAV and SOAP to allow integration with other software and compliance with internal controls.

Capture: Images of paper documents using scanners or multifunction printers. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software is often used, whether integrated into the hardware or as stand-alone software, in order to convert digital images into machine readable text.
Indexing: Indexing may be as simple as keeping track of unique document identifiers, but often it takes a more complex form, providing classification through the documents' metadata or even through word indexes extracted from the documents' contents. Indexing exists mainly to support retrieval. One area of critical importance for rapid retrieval is the creation of an index topology.
History
Beginning in the 1980s, a number of vendors began developing systems to manage paper-based documents. Initially designed to offer mainly document imaging-level capture, storage, indexing and retrieval capabilities, the applications grew to encompass electronic documents, collaboration tools, security, and auditing capabilities...
Store electronic documents. Storage of the documents often includes management of those same documents, where they are stored, for how long, migration of the documents from one storage media to another (Hierarchical storage management) and eventual document destruction.
Retrieval: Retrieve the electronic documents from the storage. Although the notion of retrieving a particular document is simple, retrieval in the electronic context can be quite complex and powerful. Simple retrieval of individual documents can be supported by allowing the user to specify the unique document identifier, and having the system use the basic index (or a non-indexed query on its data store) to retrieve the document. More flexible retrieval allows the user to specify partial search terms involving the document identifier and/or parts of the expected metadata. This would typically return a list of documents which match the user's search terms. Some systems provide the capability to specify a Boolean expression containing multiple keywords or example phrases expected to exist within the documents' contents. The retrieval for this kind of query may be supported by previously-built indexes, or may perform more time-consuming searches through the documents' contents to return a list of the potentially relevant documents.

· Distribution
· Security
· Workflow
· Collaboration
· Versioning



Software requirements:
Operating System : Windows
Technology : J2EE
Framework : Struts
Web Technologies : Html, CSS
Client Side Scripting : JavaScript
IDE : My Eclipse
Web Server : Tomcat5.5
Database Server : Oracle9i
Java Version : JDK1.5

Hardware requirements:

Hardware : Pentium IV
RAM : 256MB (minimum)