A document arrives, but the work is not done. Several people may need to review it, approve it, or take action before the process is complete. Routing is how a document management system helps records move through those defined office steps.

Imagine an invoice that needs to be checked, approved, and filed. In a paper office, that means the folder physically travels from desk to desk, and at any moment only one person knows where it is. Routing in IMS addresses the same need without passing a physical folder around the office.

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A familiar situation

Document routing is a way of sending a record to a user or a department within an IMS Profile so the next person in the process can pick it up. It helps keep work moving along an established path rather than relying on someone to remember to hand it off.

What routing is, and what it is not

Historical IMS Enterprise materials describe routing and distribution capabilities at a conceptual level. The idea is straightforward: a record is directed to the people who need to act on it next, and those people can find what is waiting for them.

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Video Demonstration

Watch IMS Routing in Action

See a demonstration of how IMS routes records between users and departments.

Watch Routing Tutorial

What this is not, is a promise of fully automated workflow. Routing helps move records along defined steps, but it should not be described as an automatic approval engine, a notification system that always alerts every recipient, or an integration that updates your accounting software on its own. Those are separate concerns, and whether any of them apply depends on what is actually configured.

Distribution: taking records with you

Distribution is a related but distinct idea. Rather than routing a live record to another user inside the system, distribution is about creating a portable, searchable collection of selected records, such as a set of documents bundled for an outside recipient or for reference away from the main workstation.

Historical IMS Enterprise materials describe distribution as an option, and as with other Enterprise capabilities, its availability can depend on the edition, module, and licensing in your configuration.

The right way to think about it

Routing and distribution are tools for helping documents move through your office in a deliberate way. They do not replace the procedures your business already follows. They support them, so the path a document takes is clear and the right people can find it at each step.

To see how routing fits alongside capture, indexing, and search, read How Does IMS Work? or visit Products & Features to compare editions.