The present invention relates to the production, design, and maintenance of business forms within a document management system. In order to produce, design, and maintain a group of forms for a particular business, it is often desirable to evaluate periodically the forms used by the business. This evaluation process is intended to produce a new portfolio of business forms that are tailored for the specific, current needs of the business. The new business form portfolio may represent, for example, a streamlined business form inventory, a more comprehensive business form inventory, a more cost-effective business form inventory, or combinations thereof. Further, it is highly desirable that the business forms be available for use in the best format (e.g., electronic, commercially printed, printed at the user's desk, printed on demand at a somewhat larger print facility, and the like). The new business form portfolio may include one or more forms which are the same as those which were used previously, except that the formats of these forms have been changed or migrated.
The conventional method of evaluating business forms involves the collection of a sample of each form used by the company. The sample forms are usually gathered from a central warehouse and grouped together, for example in one or more three ring binders. The entire collection of business forms is then evaluated as a group by a technician who manually pages through the binders. Evaluation notes are typically manually recorded, and become the basis for producing a new collection of business forms which fill the needs of the business more appropriately.
In the conventional evaluation process, it is difficult to examine and review the characteristics of the entire group of forms, because it is not possible to view information from more than a few forms simultaneously. For example, if a technician wishes to evaluate and compare the names of all the forms, it is necessary to page through the binder quickly, reading the form names while keeping the previously read form names in mind. Similarly, if the technician wishes to examine the collective functions of the forms, he must page through the binder and individually ascertain the function of each form. This form by form approach is inefficient, as a result of its manual nature, and is inaccurate because it is easy to skip forms inadvertently and to overlook form information while paging through the binder. This inaccuracy and inefficiency becomes exaggerated as the number of forms within the binder and the number of binders holding the forms increase.
The conventional method of evaluation is also undesirable because every time an analysis technician wishes to evaluate a previously unexamined aspect of the forms, it is necessary to return to the group of forms in the binder and resume the page-by-page approach described above. Similarly, if a new form is added to the group of forms, in order to compare the new form to the existing forms, it is also necessary for the technician to return to the page-by-page review process. Thus, the conventional method does not provide a catalog of form information that can be updated easily. Further, analysis of the form portfolio with respect to migration, that is, changing the type or category of the form (e.g., from a commercially printed paper form to an electronic form), has been largely a subjective process that is based on the individual technician's view of the type of form that might best meet the needs of the company for the particular application.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,953,702, issued Sep. 14, 1999, to Ohlemacher et al, assigned to the assignee of the present application, discloses a computerized document audit system. In the Ohlemacher system, a database is built by entry of a number of fields of information for each document used by a company. Reports are generated from this database, with the data being sorted by any field or fields in virtually any manner desired. While providing a significant aid to the analysis process, the Ohlemacher et al system did not provide a means by which the analysis of documents with respect to possible migration to other document categories could be effected.
Accordingly, there is a need for a comprehensive document audit system and a process for generating a migration report, listing the identities of the documents that are likely candidates for change to differing document categories.