MACHAKOS UNIVERSITY

DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM A CASE STUDY OF MACHAKOS UNIVESRISTY

BY

KELVIN MBUCHI MUCHOKI

J17-2476-2014

A PROJECT PROPOSAL SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTING

AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE AWARD OF BACHELOR OF SCIENCE IN COMPUTER
SCIENCE OF MACHAKOS UNIVERSITY

NOVEMBER ,2019

DECLARATION

I KELVIN MBUCHI MUCHOKI declare that the work conferred in this project report is my
own original work and have not been previously submitted for obtaining any other qualification.
Any reference material used has been cited and acknowledged for by the references.

KELVIN MBUCHI MUCHOKI

J17/2476/2014 Date……………………………………………

Signature:………………………………………………………
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

It brings me great pleasure for an opportunity to work and submit my project proposal on Document
Management System. For this, I would like to first and foremost thank God for giving me the ability to
bring this work to this far. I return praise to Him for the free gift of life he has given me, wonderful
opportunities that I have had, the knowledge to share with others and the strength to write and develop
this project.

My profound gratitude to my Supervisor, Ms Veronica Mutua for her commitment, advice, thoroughness
and detailed assessment of my work during the research period. Not only did she create time in order to
make sure I get the Best out of this research but also to the one reading this.

I also wish to thank my fellow colleagues for sharing their knowledge and supporting me in any way to
ensure that I deliver this work. Much thanks to all the respondents for their cooperation and participation
in the study.

Lastly, Deep appreciation goes to my family for their great assistance, love and encouragement during the
time of research.
To you all I say may God richly bless you
DECLARATION....................................................................................................................i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT.......................................................................................................ii

ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS....................................................................................iii

LIST OF FIGURES...............................................................................................................iv

ABSTRACT.........................................................................................................................v

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION........................................................................................1

1.0 introduction …………………………………………………………………………….1

1.1 Background of The Study........................................................................................1

1.2 Problem Statement....................................................................................................2

1.3 Objectives..............................................................................................................3

1.3.1 General Objective...............................................................................................3

1.3.2 Specific Objectives..............................................................................................3

1.4 Justification of the study........................................................................................4

1.5 Project Scope.........................................................................................................5

CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW................................................................................6

2.1 Introduction................................................................................................................6

2.2 Existing System...........................................................................................................7

2.2.1 Weaknesses of the Existing systems.........................................................................7

2.3 Proposed System........................................................................................................8

CHAPTER THREE: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY...................................................................9

3.0 Introduction................................................................................................................9

3.1 Software Development Methodology........................................................................10

 3.2 Data collection method and tools..............................................................................11

3.2.1Interview................................................................................................................12

3.2.2Questionnaire.........................................................................................................12

3.3.3 Observation...........................................................................................................12

3.3 Development Languages and tools............................................................................13

3.3.1Languages...............................................................................................................14

3.3.2Tools.......................................................................................................................15

REFRENCES………………………………………………………………………………………..17

ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

DMS- Document Management System

SDLC- Software Development Life Cycle
WI-FI- Wireless Fidelity
SQL- Structured Query Language
PHP- Hypertext Preprocessor
DFD- Data Flow Diagram
ERD- Entity Relationship Diagram

URL-Uniform Resource Locator

EDMS- Electronic Document Management System

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 3. 1 Agile Development methodology............................................................................... 15

 Figure 3. 2 Iterative Process Flow Model..................................................................................... 16

ABSTRACT

This System is an online document management portal for managing documents between various employees in the
university. It's a system used to produce, track, edit, store and manage documents. This innovative system allows
employees to share important documents as well as information with other employees. The staffs are able to store their
own documents in their private. In order to accomplish the objectives of developing a Document Management System,
the system would be developed in a web-based platform such that it can be accessed from anywhere anytime as long
as there is internet connection. The impact of developing this project is that it would improve workflow in terms of
sharing of documents between faculty staffs in machakos university and also increase collaboration and
communication
 CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.0 Introduction

A document is everything that has been stored into an accessible source (Eleoranta et al. 2001). While an electronic
document management system (EDMS) is defined as an automated ,electronic document and records management
system that enables organizations to manage unstructured information captured in paper and electronic formats, such
as emails, word processed and spreadsheet contents (Pauline, 2008)

In digital age, information technology and the Internet network is no stranger in the community. Almost all the
activities in the community of economic activities, education, government to leisure activities, carried out with the
involvement of information technology and the Internet. The existence of information technology and the Internet to
make someone get in touch with others without being obstructed by time and distance, so a person can communicate
and get information effectively and efficiently, therefore many government agencies, educational and private use of
information technology and the Internet because it was considered to be help improve the performance and
productivity of the company and institutions

Most learning institutions with an overarching electronic document management system in place handle with ease all
their internally and externally generated information hence operate at a more superior level in terms of efficiency and
effectiveness in service delivery as compared to those organizations that still heavily rely on manual files and folders.

Machakos University Web-based Document Management System Will help the university to improve its operations in
the delivery of Course Work materials and Online Collaboration between separate group of people i.e. lecturers and
students. If put on the internet, it will be beneficial in terms of user’s files being instantly portable and accessible with
any device with an internet connection (Cheng, J. C, 2017).
1.1 Background of The Study

The history of document management has its origins in the late nineteenth century with the invention of the file
cabinet. In 1898, Edwin Grenville Seibels devised the vertical file system, in which paper documents are organized in
drawers contained in stacked cabinets. These cabinets would remain the main method of document storage in the
business world for the greater portion of the twentieth century.

In the 1980s, an EDMS could be managed only by a word processing center operator. In the early 1990s, the
development of more user-friendly systems allowed knowledge workers to operate DMS on their own. DMS could
now be used to collaborate directly with clients. Some companies, such as Biel’s Document Management—previously
Biel’s Photocopy Service—adapted to the new trends by specializing in top-quality document management services.
Companies like Biel’s provide a variety of cutting-edge tools to help businesses develop their own document
management systems for greater efficiency, ease of access, and security. When PCs started to get distributed and
connected on a LAN (local area network), firms were then able to create and store documents on their computer—
power to the user! But distributed PCs managed by the local area network sent unstructured documents scattered
everywhere (eFileCabinet, 2015).

Today, there are a number of options when it comes to document management. Luckily, these systems are much more
user-friendly. Adding files to your document management system is quick and easy. The system allows you to search
for files in practically no time at all. Because of this, more and more companies are losing the filing cabinets and
moving toward electronic systems.

SharePoint Server as an example of a Document Management System is provided to organizations that seek greater
control over SharePoint's behavior or design. This product is installed on the customer's IT infrastructure. It receives
less frequent updates, but has access to a wider set of features and customization capabilities

1.2 Problem Statement

In order to accomplish the Machakos University mission statement, the university seeks to advance knowledge and
learning in Science and Technology through Consultancy, research and innovation for Socio-economic development.
However, Departmental staffs in the schools currently lack an appropriate and efficient decentralized platform where
they can share files and store documents . Many employees report that they miss important information, organization
policies and documents about their work because the platform for sharing is WhatsApp, manual files and Email which
at some point information may be lost. Others report that they do not get updates and notices in time hence this causes
a delays . While using other platforms for sharing documents, the information is lost on transit and does not
necessarily reach everyone.

The existing system is semi-automated system. Here, in this system there is no platform for storing personal
documents for future reference and audit in the case of compliance regulations. It’s a limited system and fewer user
friendly. Searching of particular information is very critical it takes much of the time. The users cannot restrict the file
sharing options. The different users can access documents and information belonging to other individuals. Privacy is
very important when it comes to confidential information.

Limited Collaboration is another critical limitation. Collaboration on documents is extremely hard when working with
paper versions. If several department head in machakos university need to confer on a document, they must have
multiple copies printed, make amendments separately and then share their version with each other before pursuing
further changes.

In response to the problem existing in the systems, the developed Document Management System will automate and
improved the Faculty’s operations. The system provides a platform for employees to share and manage important
information, notices and course work materials needed. It also stores documents for the purpose of auditing.

1.3 Objectives

1.3.1 General Objective

The main objective is to develop a Web based Document Management System to share, track, manage, store and
retrieve digital documents.

1.3..2 Specific Objectives

The study will include the following specific objective:

1. To analyze the requirements needed to develop the system.

2. To design a system able to store and track documents between all employees of the university.

3. To develop a system that allow sharing and management of documents.

4. To validate a Document Management System to confirm that it meets the specifications and purpose.

1.4 Project Scope

The main drive of this study is to create a Web-based Document sharing and Management system with metadata and
management capabilities within Machakos University for the school departments. The project management scope of
work to be done by the system include providing a portal that to improve collaboration and efficiency between
students and lecturers i Machakos University of Technology. The projec will developed and implemented over a time
period from November 2019 to march 2020

1.5 Justification of the study

The purpose of this project is to implement a web-based document management system that stores and manage
documents. The system is very effective where the use of mobile phones and computer systems has indeed taken over
large market and more people are familiar with the idea of Centralized access.

In this case, development and implementation of a Document Management System is significant to the Institution
Productivity in the following ways:

Increase Collaboration and Communication among the teaching staffs and students especially ingeographical location
by having the ability to quickly access documents and share them through an online workspace such as internet.
Document retrieval when needed later can be possible with this system.

Improving workflow in terms of movement of documents between users of the systems and also storage of personal
documents.

Regulatory Compliance. The system helps in ensuring compliance with rules and regulations by the government
requiring maintenance of different kinds of data and documents.

It helps in making it much easier and faster to locate and access the right information. This saves on the cost and time
of searching for documents in the repository.
 CHAPTER TWO

LITERATURE REVIEW

2.0 Introduction

This chapter concerned the review of related existing literature of online document management system . It presents
documented evidence and ideas from other researcher’s work that is relevant to this project’s context. It looks at
different sources where my research has borrowed constructive ideas considered important in line with the research
objectives for the fulfillment of this study and also discuss the existing systems with their strengths and limitations
and summarize the findings on the whole chapter .

2.1 Existing System

One of the biggest effects that modern technology has on business operations and institutions revolves around
document automation. It is increasingly used within certain industries to assemble legal documents, contracts and
letters.
A Web-based Document Management System developed by Sengol Mary J and Usha S (2015), revolves around a
centralized repository that is used to manage the storage of any type of information that could be of value to an
organization, and protect the same against loss. As content stored within a DMS is typically self-contained, a well-
designed document management system promotes finding and sharing of information. Also, based on the developed
system the first step in the document lifecycle that kicks off the document management workflow is the creation of
documents. The operations performed are creation, editing, review, approval, publishing, distribution and reading.
Each phase of the process is performed by a person in a specific role with distinct access to and responsibility for a
document. It is important to understand these roles and what each can do in the system. The system adopts the
document process and document management workflow of the previous system, the current system is related to the
developed system in terms of operations like creation, editing and viewing of documents. Also, it has a similarity
when it comes to distinct person who is accessing the documents. (Sengol,2015)
A Document Management System developed by Zhang Deng-Hong and Liang Xiao-Hong (2010), was developed to
adopt the mode of user grading management to provide different resources to different levels of customer. It is a kind
of network resources sharing mechanism. The Document Management System includes two kinds of service: user
management and resources sharing. Resources sharing can be divided into uploading, downloading and deleting. It is
mainly used for providing the resources sharing. Documents can only be shared to be accessed, including uploading,
downloading and deleting in its level. The system brings out a management method of centralization and multi-user
processing. It offers a simple and effective tool for document management. If expanded, such as, it can provide higher
data sharing performance for document sharing and higher efficiency of document management.
2.1.1 Weaknesses of the Existing systems
The concept of the study on the existing systems helped the developers to improve and understand document sharing.
While in terms of providing all kinds of supporting documents format, pictures and media files, the current system can
also process user defined formatting documents. The current project and the developed system can only be shared to
be accessed. The existing system is semi-automated system. Here, in this system there is no platform for storing
personal documents for future reference and audit in the case of compliance regulations. It’s a limited system and
fewer users friendly. Searching of particular information is very critical it takes lot of time. The users cannot able to
restrict the file sharing options. Enforcement of Audit and accountability program is a challenge in the existing system.
The system does not have an automated method of making its users aware of some of the security risks that come with
the convenience of digital devices, rigorous maintaining of a proper document management system and its various
processes. This increases the possibility for accidental security breaches in the company information.
2.2 Proposed System
The development of this new proposed system will contain the following activities, which is to try to automate the
entire process keeping in the view of database integration approach. User Friendliness will be provided in the
application with various controls provided by system Rich User Interface. The system makes the overall project
management much easier and flexible. It can be accessed over the Internet. Various classes will be used for file
uploading and downloading. The user information files are stored in distributed database which can be maintained by
the system. This can give the good security for user information because data is not in client machine. Authentication
is provided for this application only registered users can access. There is no risk of data management at any level
while the project development is under process.
 CHAPTER THREE

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

3.0 Introduction
The purpose of this chapter is to clarify the methodological framework used to conduct this research
project. In details, this chapter presents the discussion on the research methodology of the study, the
methods and procedures of data gathering used.
3.1Software Development Methodology
A methodology is a system of broad principles or rules from which specific methods or procedures may
be derived to interpret or solve different problems within the scope of a particular discipline. (itinfo,2018)

software development methodology is a framework that is used to structure, plan, and control the process
of developing an information system. This kind of development methodologies are only concerned with
the software development process, so it does not involve any technical aspect of, but only concern with
proper planning for the software development. Software development methodologies play a vital part of
developing the software. There are many methodologies which are used by the professional software
development companies and Software Engineers nowadays ranging from conventional, time consuming
models for large project to iterative, fast project development process models (tatvasoft,2018).

The Agile Software Development method is chosen as a methodology for this project and all activities are
organized and arranged as per methodology defined in this model. Agile Software Development is an
approach that is used to design a disciplined software management process which also allows some
frequent alteration in the development project. This is a type of software development methodologies
which is one conceptual framework for undertaking various software engineering projects. It is used to
minimize risk by developing software in short time boxes which are called iterations.

Some of the reason for choice of Iterative Approach model as process model are:
Agile methodology has an adaptive approach which is able to respond to the changing requirements of
the clients. Direct communication and constant feedback from customer representative leave no space for
any guesswork in the system.
Document Management System is implemented and executed following the iterative approach of the agile
method illustrated below.

Figure 3. 1 Agile Development methodology

Figure 3. 2 Iterative Process Flow Model
As it is a large system that being implemented, some feature may be kept adding with time. My reason
for selecting iterative model is that in such type of system, that are processed for decision making
purposes, it is common for new analytical details addition, addition of new reports and many other
synchronization features. Accordingly, one needs to make some modification on software design and
requirement analysis. Thus the iterative development process is the most suitable methodology for
decision support system. Due to nature of the project the iterative SDLC model is ideal.

3.3Data collection method and tools

There are many tools and methods for the collection of data and they might differ from one type of data
(Quantitative or qualitative) to another.
3.2.1 Interview

For the purposes of this project, in depth interviews was used. In depth interviews are personal and
unstructured interviews, whose aim is to identify participant’s emotions, feelings, and opinions regarding
a particular research subject. The main advantage of personal interviews is that they involve personal and
direct contact between interviewers and interviewees, as well as eliminate non-response rates, but
interviewers need to have developed the necessary skills to successfully carry an interview. What is more,
unstructured interviews offer flexibility in terms of the flow of the interview, thereby leaving room for
the generation of conclusions that were not initially meant to be derived regarding a research subject.
However, there is the risk that the interview may deviate from the pre-specified research aims and
objectives.

3.2.2Questionnaire
As far as data collection tools was concerned, the conduction of the research also involved the use of
Semi-Structured questionnaire, which was used as an interview guide for the researcher. Some certain
questions were prepared, so as for the researcher to guide the interview towards the satisfaction of
research objectives, but additional questions were made encountered during the interviews. The reason
behind choosing this method of data collection is that responses can be analyzed with quantitative
methods by assigning numerical values. Also the results are generally easier to analyze than qualitative
techniques of data collection. Finally, Pretest/Posttest can be compared and analyzed. However, one
major disadvantage of Using questionnaires is the possibility of low response rates. Low response can
lower the confidence in the results provided by the respondents. Another disadvantage is the inability to
probe responses. Questionnaires are structured instruments. They allow little flexibility to the respondent
with respect to response format. In essence, they often lose the "flavor of the response
 3.2.3 Observation

Observation is another method used to collect information. The reason behind the choice of this method
is that It allows for the study of the dynamics of a situation, frequency counts of target behaviors, or other
behaviors as indicated by needs of the evaluation. It is a Good source for providing additional
information about a particular group, can use video to provide documentation. Can produce qualitative
(e.g., narrative data) and quantitative data (e.g., frequency counts, mean length of interactions, and
instructional time). 3.3 Development Languages and tools.

3.3.1 Languages
The following are the programming languages that were used for the development of Murang’a University
of Technology Document Management System.

Languages and Scripting

I. PHP

II. HTML

III. CSS

IV. JAVASCRIPT

V. JQUERY

VI. SQL

VII. AJAX

VIII. Code Igniter Framework.

3.3.2 Tools
The following tools were used during the development cycle.

I. Xampp localhost/ local server

II. Sublime Text Code Editor

III. Microsoft project for planning of projects schedule

IV. HeidiSQL Database Management Tools

In addition to the tools, some framework used in the development were:

i. Bootstrap (For a responsive web interface) and Ajax Control toolkit for PHP

ii. Code Igniter PHP framework

REFERENCES

eFileCabinet (2015) History of document management .Retrieved from

https://www.efilecabinet.com

Oracle enterprise content management products (2018) .Retrieved from

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E14571_01/doc.1111/e14860/ecm.htm#FMWLC274

Mary, J. S., & Usha, S. (2015). Web based document management systems in life science
2015 Online International Conference on (pp. 1-3). IEEE.

http://www.itinfo.am/eng/software-development-methodologies/