Five Main Problems That Document Management Solves

Document Management is an area that is largely ignored in many businesses.  Unfortunately, ignoring this area of your business exposes you to a wide variety of problems that are very easy to resolve.  A good Document Management system can take a very mundane task, and transform it into a fun and useful tool for your business.  Over the years we have have compiled a list of some of the biggest issues that businesses struggle with due to a non-existant, or poorly designed, Document Management system.

1. Unorganized Filing System: This is the easiest area to benefit from a computerized Document Management system.  You should be able create folders to categorize your documents.  You need to be able to assign keywords to documents as well as a good title and description of the content of the document.  These things make locating a specific document easy for people.
2. Security: The easiest way to handle security is with member groups.  An example would be your accounting department.  You would assign all your accountants and financial staff to a member group called Accounting.  Then, all the folders having financial documents would also be assigned to the Accounting group.  Now, all the financial data will have security assigned to them such that only the designated Accounting users have access to these respective folders.  This is a very basic implementation, which should also be able to be augmented with Read Only, Read & Add and Full access levels.
3. Version Control: A good Document Management system should also include a version control system that keeps track of who made what changes, and when.  The version control system needs to allow the document owner, or system administrator, to roll back to prior versions should a disaster (user accidentally overwrites another user’s work) occur.
4. Review / Approve / Workflow: You should have at minimum some form of Review/Approve cycle, even if it is basic.  At best, a full workflow system affords you the flexibility to develop mutiple workflow processes where the users / department heads needed to review or approve a document can be preset.  These workflows need to determine the order of the users, the need to review or approve, and a full follow-up process to alert the next user that it is their turn to review or approve a document and a link to get their easily.
5. Photo / Video Gallery: A nice additional feature is being able to create special folders for use as  photo and/or video galleries.  This would include next and previous buttons, of course.

There are many, many, more features to match up the needs of the business and the software.  If you have unique issues of your own, please feel free to comment, and we’ll respond as best we can.