There are a number of products out there that can help you accomplish classifying all your electronic documents and applying bulk processing. There are entry level products available, typically designed for lower volume (500 documents a month), that are price friendly but tend not to be as feature rich as the professional level tools.
The ability to classify and process documents automatically is often called different things by different developers. You might want to try researching document management systems that boast the following features:
- Forms processing
- Unstructured forms processing
- Auto index
- Intelligent indexing
- Document auto store
The capture and classification part of this can actually be very easy, depending on the complexity of your documents (i.e. are they documents you create, you receive or both?). The important part is how the information is handled after the fact. Do they need to be routed along approval paths? Does the processed information need to be ingested into another system (i.e. CRM or ERP)? Who needs access to the information and documents? Are the documents allowed to be modified or edited after being processed? And so on.
When evaluating information management or document management systems like these it's important to look at the life-cycle of your documents from beginning to end (creation through archiving) and making sure you get a product that meets all your needs. You may find that no one product fits all your needs and that's normal, but you still need to evaluate the entire life-cycle so if you invest in multiple products you are certain they will integrate well with one another.
