A Meridian vault can store any type of document: specifications, drawings, manuals, letters, email messages, calculations, digital photographs, scanned images, and so on. However, folder names, file names, and file extensions are often insufficient or too limited to adequately classify large quantities of documents. Meridian allows you to classify documents by document type according to their business purpose. This gives you complete freedom to name folders and files without regard to their format or native application. It also makes configuring Meridian more logical because a Meridian document type determines many characteristics of documents independent of their file type:
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The templates they are created from
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How they are named and stored, either automatically or manually
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What property pages and wizard pages they display and when wizard pages are shown
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The workflow they must follow to be edited and approved
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How and when revision numbers are incremented
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Which users can access them and how
Different file types can be classified by the same Meridian document type and a file in one format can be assigned to any one of many Meridian document types. Before creating document types, it is very helpful to first gather as much information as possible about the characteristics in the preceding list.
Creating and configuring document types is described in the following topics.
