Is there a different between Managed Documents and Document Management

[Aritha2]

The product documentation provided by Servicenow mentions a Document Management plugin [com.snc.platform_document_management] however, when this plugin does not seem to be available. I do see Employee Document Management and Managed Documents. Is this a plugin that is no longer available or for an upcoming release?

[Yamilla Manjko]

Hello! Apparently, as Brian22 wrote on this topic this is the answer:

Forum posts before 2023 are likely not to have the correct updated information. This is because the document management system has been revamped with "Managed Documents" being replaced with "Document Management" as part of Document Services. This new capability came out with Rome, was updated again with Tokyo and serves as an alternative to attachments.
The topic is not well publicized from what I can tell. Apologies!

The official docs site for current version is here: 

LIMITATIONS OF ATTACHMENTS (legacy ‘managed docs’ plugin vs new 'document management)

–No Document Metadata or search based on Metadata

–No Versioning

–No Lifecycle Management (draft, reviewed, published)

–No Universal Referencing (attachment is always local file to the record, reupload for every record)

–Limited UAC, anyone with access to record can access the file

–No external (public) permalink option for document (if desired) 

Comparison: sys_attachments vs ds_document:

Capability	Attachments (sys_attachments)  [legacy]	Documents (ds_document)  [newer]
Security	No UAC. Accessible to all users who have access to the record	UAC - access to file is separated from access to the record.
Versioning	No versioning	Supports versioning, which allows users to track changes to documents over time.
Searching	No metadata based search	Metadata can be searched by name, title, author, and other properties.
Referencing	No referencing	Single document can be referred to multiple parent records
Storage	Same document must be attached repeatedly on every record where it would be referenced.	Same content can be referred to multiple target records

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But to be honest, this is still not clear to me on the docs site.