What is the difference between documents management and document control?

I have been asked many times about the difference between document management and document control. Today's post is about this subject.

Document Management is also referred to as Content Management. Content Management is the set of processes and technologies that support the collection, managing, and publishing of electronic information. These processes and technologies allow managing electronic content through its lifecycle from its creation, review, storage and dissemination to destruction. Main goals are accessibility, findability, and re-use of content.

Document Control is revision control of documents, assigning and tracking documents numbers, change control management, assuring documents compliance, documents routing and tracking. It can also include Bill of Materials (BOM) and Approved Vendor List (AVL) management in engineering organizations.

Content or Document Management usually includes Document Control activities.

They are entirely different terms and should not be used interchangeably.

In companies, especially in regulated industries, there are document control people for performing document control functions separately. They do not have any functions related to content management. Document control is usually part of QA. It is mandated function in regulated industries.

I will talk more about document control in my future posts.