Purpose of This Guide
This guide describes the Document Management module of QDMS Now from the point of view of the people who use it: document owners, controllers, approvers, quality managers and readers.
It explains what each screen is for, what the system does on your behalf, and which decisions have to be made before configuration rather than after.
Who this guide is for
| Role | What to read first |
|---|---|
| Quality manager / system administrator | Document Folders — the folder tree and its matrices decide nearly everything else. |
| Document owner | Documents and Lifecycle. |
| Controller / approver | Lifecycle — what your task means and what happens when you act on it. |
| Reader | Viewing and Printing — how to find, read, confirm and print a document. |
How the guide is organized
- Getting Started — the concepts and the prerequisites.
- Document Folders — the tree, inheritance and the five matrices.
- Documents — the record itself, its fields, files and responsibilities.
- Lifecycle — the states, who acts at each one, and the tasks the system creates.
- Revisions and Review — how a published document changes and how it is kept current.
- Distribution and Controlled Copies — notifying readers and tracking physical prints.
- Viewing and Printing — the reader-facing side.
- Definitions — the lookup lists the module depends on.
Conventions used here
- Field names appear in bold exactly as they are labelled on screen.
- Notes that prevent a common mistake appear as callouts.
- Where the system does something automatically — creating a task, cancelling a sibling task, stamping a watermark — the guide says so explicitly, because these are the parts that surprise new users.
note
Screens are configurable. Your organization may have hidden fields, renamed labels or added custom fields through Function Design. If a field described here is missing, it has most likely been hidden for your role rather than removed from the product.