With the legal requirements for retaining records on the increase, with the mind-numbing complexity of document management systems growing exponentially and with the cost of such systems skyrocketing, the records retention challenge facing California’s public education agencies has gotten out of hand.  Until now.  CEDR Systems, the developers of ED-JOIN and the SEIS network serving SELPA’s throughout the state, has created a simple and customizable system that offers records management and a lot more.  And because CEDR is a department of the San Joaquin County Office of Education and not a for-profit vendor, its Document Management System (DMS) is affordable.

DMS exploits two emerging technologies, Internet-based data management and optical scanning, and blends them seamlessly into a suite of tools designed with the file management needs of school districts and county offices in mind. 

How to Jump Start Records Management

Key Features of DMS

• With the latest in Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Optical Mark Recognition (OMR), users can set the system to recognize, record, and format text in various areas on a document, which are indexed and stored in a database.  This information can later be used as search criteria when searching for the document from the DMS online.
  
• Regardless of the number of scan stations, DMS centralizes all data and scanned documents to provide data integrity and accuracy.  Since DMS utilizes the latest in web services, scan stations can also be setup at remote locations.
  
• Scanned documents can be immediately searched and retrieved online, anytime, from any computer, without the need of any special hardware or software.
  
• DMS uses "digital staples" to organize and merge files with new or previously scanned documents.  Document can also be organized by using a simple customized folder/file structure and sorted by simply dragging and dropping pages within a file.
  
• DMS incorporates and create simple retrieval protocols to ensure that the right people have access to the right records. Furthermore, access to all documents in DMS is completely secure and encrypted.
  
• The flexibility of DMS can provide customization at the district, department, and even individual user level.  DMS provide user management capabilities and allows specific permissions to be set for each individual user.  DMS also tracks all users
  
• DMS also provides an automatic purging feature that allows districts to set a purging date on records/files that can be purged after a number of years.

If your school, district or COE would like more information on this service, please contact Johnny Arguelles at the SJCOE, CEDR department, at (209) 468-5924.