Electronic document management systems (EDMS, for its acronym in English, or SGD in reference to Document Management Systems) are all those computer programs created for the management of large quantities of documents. They often track, store, archive and organize electronic documents or images of paper documents. These documents do not have a clear organization of their contents, unlike what usually happens with information stored in a database. Most of these products have the ability to maintain a record of the different versions and modifications of documents that users carry out. The combination of this type of document libraries with indexes stored in a database allows quick access by various methods to the information contained in the documents. These are generally compressed and, in addition to text, can contain any other type of multimedia documents, such as images or videos.

Document management systems commonly provide storage, security, as well as retrieval and indexing capabilities.[1] The term partially overlaps with the concept of content management system and is often seen as a component of enterprise content management (ECM) systems and related to digital asset management. It is related to digital resource management, document digitization, workflow management, and records management.

Starting in the 1980s, several manufacturers began developing software systems to manage paper documents. These systems dealt with documents that included not only printed and published documents, but also photographs, engravings, etc.

Later developers began to create a second type of system that could manage electronic documents, that is, all those documents, or files, created using computers, and often stored in the users' local file system. Older electronic document management (EDM) systems managed proprietary format file types, or a limited number of file formats. Many of these systems came to be called document scanning systems because they focused on the capture, storage, indexing, and retrieval of graphic file formats. EDM systems evolved to a point where the systems could handle any type of file format that could be stored digitally. Applications grew to encompass electronic documents, collaborative work tools, security, workflow, and auditing capabilities.

These systems allowed an organization to record faxes and forms, save copies of the documents as images, and store the image files in the information repository for quick and secure retrieval. Such retrieval is possible because the system handled the extraction of text from the document in the capture process, and the text indexer function provides text retrieval capability.