Document Management

When reports are archived in Monarch Server, they are compressed and stored in their entirety. Users retrieving information from the report warehouse, however, may choose to retrieve portions of a report. These portions of reports are called documents. For example, a February music invoice report may contain invoices for dozens of different music stores. A user looking for the February invoice for only Betty’s Music Store, however, needs to retrieve just that portion of the file. The invoice for Betty’s Music Store can be represented as a single document in the stored February invoice report.

To configure stored information so that users can access it in this way, you need to define how you want to break out documents from the input reports. What makes up a document? In some cases, such as with a file of numerous invoices, the answer is easy: each invoice in the file is a separate document. For other reports, however, you may need input from users to determine how to define documents.

You categorize the documents you define as document types and then assign them to previously defined document groups. For each document type (e.g., Music Orders), you specify index fields (e.g., Customer Name) and then map them to the corresponding indexes in the assigned Monarch model file. You then configure a filing task and execute it via a filing process to archive the documents into the system. (A filing task uses the document type information to parse individual reports and index, compress and store them for later retrieval.) Lastly, you grant users access rights to the document types and security keywords, so that they can specify search criteria to retrieve documents.

The archiving process comprises eight steps, all performed within MSAdmin:

Note: Though the sequence of these tasks represents a logical progression, you do not have to follow their exact order.