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SIDMA stands for System Independant Document Management Application

A Document Management System is a computer system (or set of computer programs) used to track and store electronic documents and/or images of paper documents. Many aplications store documents in the computer-application that produced the document or that uses the document in some way.

Systems change on average every 10 to 15 years in an organisation. In the transition to a new system, many data get lost. Much historical information, produced both by government and private organisations produced in the last 30 years is lost, due to dyscontinuing old computersystems. If the documents are stored, they are often difficult or not readable, because they are saved in outdated formats or data carriers.

This problem can be solved by saving all important documents of an organisation outside the computer-system in a System Independent Document Management Application (SIDMA). All documents are either duplicated in the SIDMA or the application can access all documents in the SIDMA.

SIDMA stores all relevant documents in a future proof manner in its system. For extra security, documents may additionally be stored in a hardcopy format.

For setting up a SIDMA, an organisation must first decide which information is important to save for the future and which information can be discarded, after the system has used it. Only information that has to be stored for the future will be stored in SIDMA. The minimum information that must be stored is set by the laws that specify what information an organisation must store, the so called Regulatory compliance.

Organizations with SIDMA will find it easier to migrate to new systems and to make different systems within their organisation work together. Instead of migrating data to a new system, the new system only has to be able to access the data from the SIDMA of the organisation. Connections between different systems of the organisation are less or not needed, when all systems access all their data trough SIDMA.

The term SIDMA was first coined by Nitin Antoon van Nieuwenhoven on 1th September 2012. Nitin Antoon van Nieuwenhoven is business analist with Bista Solutions Inc, an OpenERP software company. He believes SIDMA is a new development that in the near future will be on the agenda of every organisation that takes compliance seriously.