Document Management is a set of technologies for managing the "document life cycle," that is, it tracks, monitors, and allocates resources for the creation, use, revision, approval, retrieval, archival and disposal of documents. The term document used here loosely applies to any container of information, whether electronic or not, whether text or not, and whether business-critical or not.

The Gartner Group defines document management as "a highly integrated set of middleware services that integrate library services, document manufacturing, and document interchage with critical business process applications around a client-server topology using open application interfaces."

IDC defines document management as a software system that is capable of organizing document production, managing accessibility and distribution of volumes of textual documents and overseeing document flow.