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## External Document Integration

Documents have an enormous impact in the operations of an organization. With the explosion of digital media and the worldwide web, electronic documents of a wide variety of formats, including non-printed media, are forcing organizations to address the management of these documents. The value of information in these documents can be maintained only if the documents can be managed and shared. Document management systems offer organizations the ability to share, manage, and reuse important digital documents in a single shared resource.

By integrating a document management system with a workflow system, a managed document can be directed to appropriate individuals at appropriate times, optimizing the impact of the document's information. Oracle Workflow provides seamless open integration with Oracle's third party document management (DM) integration partners. In a workflow process, you can attach documents stored in a document management system, which we call DM documents or documents generated by a PL/SQL procedure, which we call PL/SQL documents. You attach a document to a workflow process by referencing the document in a predefined item attribute or message attribute of type Document. See: Attribute Types, To Define an Item Type or Activity Attribute and To Define a Message Attribute.

For PL/SQL documents, the item or message attribute's value would be the name of the PL/SQL package and procedure used to generate the document. The PL/SQL procedure must follow an Oracle Workflow standard interface. The document generated by the PL/SQL procedure is simply displayed within the text of a notification. See: Standard API for a "PL/SQL" Document.

For DM documents, the item or message attribute's value would be the prefix DM, followed by the node ID of the document management system, and the document ID, as assigned by the document management system. The node ID is assigned when you initially identify your document management system in the Document Nodes web page. See: Defining Document Management Repositories.

### See Also

Document Management Integration in Notifications

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