Development Of University Document Management System

INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the Study
University Management System (UMS) deals with the maintenance of university, faculty, and student information within the university. UMS is an automation system, which is used to store the faculty, student, courses and information of a university.
Starting from registration of a new student in the university, it maintains all the details regarding the attendance and marks of the students. The project deals with retrieval of information through an INTRANET based campus wide portal with an integration of document management system which helps to facilitate a smooth workflow of document transfer and management within the organization. It collects related information from all the departments of an organization and maintains files, which are used to generate reports in various forms to measure individual and overall performance of the students.
Integrated systems directed at university management are increasingly more common in the university sector. Their primary objective is to improve services provided to the internal community (professors, students and employees).
By using these systems students have direct and rapid contact with the different university departments, facilitating communication between members, allowing
files to be exchanged, enrolments to be made, projects to be registered, debate forums to be created. This type of management allows for simultaneous monitoring of student performance and relationships between university members, resulting in a faster and more simplified flow of operational information.
Document Management System is a robust solution for various formats, addressing document entry, processing, approval, and storage in secure electronic archives.
The purpose of DMS is to manage and control all electronic documentation – whether word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and graphics or e-mail messages through their life cycle. It enables an organization to ensure the availability of information wherever it is needed. It also ensures the security of electronic documents through version control, audit trails for each document, and by controlling access to documents via various security levels.
DMS manage and control all unstructured information – that is, information in for example word processing documents, presentation packages, spreadsheets, e-mail, graphics – in one single database accessible through a single interface. It gives companies the ability to ensure the availability of information whenever it is needed and ensures document integrity. It further avoids or limits duplication of effort already undertaken. Just as there are standard procedures to manage and control paper documents and records, suitable procedures should be implemented to manage electronic documents throughout their life cycle. The control offered by a DMS also ensures document integrity. Document integrity includes the ability to identify and access records over time, as well as ensuring that the document is the authentic master copy/authoritative version. A document has integrity when it can be shown that the document has not changed, without going through the proper channels. This is very difficult to do where electronic files are concerned. It is easy to open a file and change it without anyone knowing. With a DMS, document integrity will be ensured, since audit trails can be used as proof that a document is still the authorized copy; security will ensure that no unauthorized access can take place; and version control will ensure that the latest, most current or approved version will be easy to identify. Without document management, it will be difficult to prove the integrity of an electronic document, should a legal need arise. If the actual electronic document is controlled and can be shown to be controlled, document integrity can be ensured more easily.
Development process of the system starts with System analysis. System analysis involves creating a formal model of the problem to be solved by understanding requirements.

1.2 Problem definition
There are courses which do not provide option for revaluation, but at the time of valuation it is done on two stages i.e. by two staff members. But there are course which provides the facility for revaluation, but initially the paper is valued once. The software should be designed and developed in such a way that it accommodates all needs in dynamic fashion. It should be a general purpose one.
The first problem is that there are loads of hard copied documents are being generated. Keeping the information in the form of hard copied documents lead to many problems.
All the process done manually at the centers and all the records are maintained on the papers. So the maintenance of the record is very difficult in the departments as well as it is very difficult for the staff to check the record. The existing system is monotonous, time consuming, less flexible and provides a very hectic working schedule. The chance of loss of record is very high and also record searching is very difficult. Maintenance of the system is also very difficult and takes a lot of time. Result processing is slow due to paper work and requirement of staff.

1.3 Aim and Objective of the study.
The aim of this work is to develop a system that will manage electronic transfer of updated files within a University System while the specific objectives are to:
 To design an Electronic document management system that delivers files in seconds serving time and maintain an efficient workflow of documents in university management system using PHP.
 To design an efficient database that keeps reliable and up to date records of files.

1.4 Purpose of the study
The purpose of this work is to bridge the gap between documentation and the security, integrity and tampering issues. This work also saves space, money and time in the processing of documents compared to the current traditional paper documentation which requires large storage space and requires labour as well as transfer of documents from one department to another.

1.5 Future Scope and future enhancement of project
In future the software can get modified to use more efficiently and reliably and enhancements can be made since the software is built on user friendly language.

1.6 Definition of Terms
DBMS (Database management systems): A computer software applications that interact with the user, other applications, and the database itself to capture and analyze data.
DMS (Document Management System): A document management system is a system (based on computer programs in the case of the management of digital documents) used to track, manage and store documents.
EDMS (Electronic Document Management System): This is a collection of technologies that work together to provide a comprehensive solution for managing the creation, capture, indexing, storage, retrieval, and disposition of records and information assets of the organization.
GUI (Graphical user interface): GUI is a human-computer interface (i.e., a way for humans to interact with computers) that uses windows, icons and menus and which can be manipulated by a mouse.
Data integrity: This refers to maintaining and assuring the accuracy and consistency of data over its entire life-cycle, and is a critical aspect to the design, implementation and usage of any system which stores, processes, or retrieves data.
Privacy (Also called information privacy): is the aspect of information technology (IT) that deals with the ability an organization or individual has to determine what data in a computer system can be shared with third parties.
Unicode: is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world’s writing systems. Developed in conjunction with the Universal Character Set standard and published as The Unicode Standard, the latest version of Unicode contains a repertoire of more than 110,000 characters covering 100 scripts and multiple symbol sets.