DOCUMENT TRACKING SYSTEM FOR AKANU IBIAM FEDERAL POLYTECHNIC UNWANA, AFIKPO: DESIGN GUIDELINES AND MODEL IMPLEMENTATION

Abstract

Documents have become part of the daily activities ranging from communication to decision making. When these documents, containing sensitive or useful information, are not properly monitored, it can result to their loss, delay or even deliberate destruction usually at the detriment of the owner or the intended recipient. In addition to the effort made by previous studies to enable remote users track their documents in real-time using both SMS and email, most of these systems failed to monitor the two types of documents (paper documents and electronic documents) from one platform. In this study, a prototype system have been proposed to solve the problem of tracking both paper and electronic official documents. To achieve this objective, three modules - electronic movement register, a search tool and a status notification module - were developed and integrated into a single cloud application in order to ensure both easy accessibility of documents and real-time alerts of document status. Using Object Oriented Analysis and Design Methodology (OOADM), the proposed system was designed. The implementation was done with Java and XML at the front-end; and PHP at the back-end while MySQL was used for managing the database. After proper system evaluation which was done with both an emulator and a Lenovo 101020A Android phone, the proposed document management systems proved to provide single tracking platform for both paper and electronic documents; and real-time monitoring of these documents using a combination of SMS and email updates. Keywords: Document tracking, paper documents, electronic documents, design methodology, system implementation