Document Management FAQ


This content is intended to help answer specific UW configurations and use cases. Need more help? Please contact the EDM team using our Get help with Document Management (DocFinity) form. 

General Questions

UW Facilities records are available to current UW students, faculty, and staff. Visit the UW Facilities page to learn more about their services.
The following characters are allowed in metadata: 
  • ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
  • abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
  • 0123456789
  • !"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~

The following Unicode characters cannot be used as metadata values in DocFinity:

  • x
  • ÷ 
  • Œ
  • œ

File Name Conventions

If the file name contains characters that are neither the BASIC_LATIN nor the LATIN_1_SUPPLEMENT Unicode blocks, DocFinity will replace the file name with a unique ID that includes only basic ASCII characters. This bug will be resolved in a future version of DocFinity.

File Size and Format Guidelines

Users may select Document Viewer in their personal preferences to display any documents of any size.

Note: 99% of the files in the DMS are 30MB or smaller. In our testing, 2GB files can take anywhere from 2.5 to 5 minutes to download, depending on various factors.

Alternatively, the document may be downloaded for viewing in the application on your computer.

  1. In the Viewer Panel, click on the’hamburger’ icon.
  2. Then click on the Open Document in Native Application
        Image: DocFinity Viewer Panel menu with hamburger icon click to open document in native application

Users can also download documents from the dropdown under the ’hamburger’ icon:

  1. In the Results Panel list select the record and click on the’hamburger’ icon:
        Image: DocFinity Results Panel menu, select record and click on hamburger icon to download document

  2. Click on Download Document in the dropdown list:
        This is an image of a DocFinity dropdown menu (from step 1) where you can download a document.
The current configuration supports files up to 2 GB. This limit can be revised if there is a business need.
No, there are no restrictions. DocFinity supports importing, uploading, storing, retrieving, and flowing any digital file format.

The following file types can be viewed directly within DocFinity. Other formats need to be downloaded and opened in their native applications to view.

File Types    
.bmp pdf(*) .sxw
.csv .pkx .tif
.doc .png .tiff (*)
.docm .potx .txt
.docx .ppam .xlm
.dot .pps .xls
.dotm .ppsm .xlsb
.dotx .ppsx .xlsm
.gif .ppt .xlsx
.htm .pptm .xltm
.html .pptx .xlt
.jpg .ps .xlt
.lam .rpt .xltx
    .xlw

Clarifications

  • PDF: The viewer can display any PDF except for a multi-page PDF called "PDF Portfolio".
  • TIFF: The viewer can display Black and White TIFFs (Low Compression Group 3 and High Compression Group 4), Grayscale TIFFs (LZW and JPEG Compression), and Color TIFFs (LZW and JPEG Compression)

Indexing and Updating Metadata

  • Save: Saves metadata for all documents in the batch for future indexing.
  • Commit Batch: Index the documents in the currently checked-out batch. Only documents that have all required metadata are indexed. Any remaining documents stay in the batch, which is automatically checked in and indexed later. If all documents in a batch are indexed, the batch is removed.

Subsidiary Questions

It's available via GitHub.
  • If the document is partially indexed on one day, then completed on another, the Ingest Date is the date of partial indexing.
  • If the document is indexed in a batch, but not committed, the Ingest Date is the date it was indexed, but not when it was committed.