Document Management Systems are great for keeping control of your documents. The ability to keep a record of a document’s history, understand who changed what and store them in a central location have vastly changed the way we work compared to 10 or 15 years ago; when network shares, limited collaboration and no version history was often the case.
Problems still arise though, particularly if your organisation relies heavily on email. For example, sending an email and needing to reference a document stored in the Document Management System. Chances are you will end up attaching the document to the email and sending that – try using Outlook to send a short-cut to a document held in SharePoint, chances are you’ll find it easier to send the physical document. Yes, we could use SharePoint to create the email, but for organisations that heavily rely on Outlook this requires a different way of working.
On a daily basis we receive emails with documents attached to them, addressed to multiple recipients in the organisation. I’m sure most of these documents never leave the confines of the Inbox folder, some may be stored in the ‘My Documents’ folder and the lucky ones will end up in the Document Management System.
Systems now require automatic filing of documents as they arrive (replacing the document attachment with a short-cut to the filed document), ensuring everybody on the email views the same document, and not a copy of the same document. Storing the document centrally improves security, while additional meta-data filed with the document can also be used to control and monitor access. By promoting the use of short-cuts in emails we can start to more closely integrate email and Document Management Systems together.
The SAFEmail document management component has now integrated with a couple of Document Management Systems. Is it time your email system integrated with your Document Management System? Find out more about our SAFEmail product range here.