How a Document Management System Can Help Your Small Business
Why is it that in 10 seconds on Google you can find exactly what you are looking for in an entire world of online information, but you could spend 10 minutes (or more!) locating a file on your local file server?
If you can’t remember where you—or someone else—put that file, it’s File Treasure Hunt time. A File Treasure Hunt involves clicking into dozens of folders inside of folders inside of folders. Like a bunch of bad blind dates, they all seem promising until you look a little closer.
If you’re getting desperate, you could ask the Windows Search Dog to try and track it down, then check back in the afternoon to see what he dug up. If you have ever used the Search Dog to find something on a file server, you instantly hate him. He’s slow, inaccurate and often completely useless. I suspect he’s aging and partially blind.
If you have a hard time finding files stored on your server, that’s one sign you may need to revolutionize how you store your company files with a document management system.
Here are seven more signs that a small business may need a document management system, and how a document management system can help fix what’s broken.
- You produce files that your clients need to review or receive.
- You need access to files outside of the office.
- You work on files or documents in small teams.
- Your teams aren’t always in the same physical location.
- You are locked in an epic struggle with a folder structure that constantly changes shape, depending on what “makes sense” to whoever is saving a file.
- You still store a lot of paper documents.
- Your clients regularly send you files or documents.
How a Document Management System Works
In its most basic form, a document management system provides a web-accessible repository of your files and documents. It’s a bit like a file server in the cloud. But a document management system offers several major advantages over a traditional file server.
1. Smarter Storage
Imagine if Amazon.com put a product on their website, but you had to successfully navigate through five subcategories to find it? No one would buy. But that’s how a file server works.
A document management system brings the obvious power of websites like Google and Amazon.com to your file system. Files are fully searchable and can be found by search for words or phrases located anywhere in the document. You can assign multiple categories or tags to a file for quick retrieval of all files in a project, or all price sheets, marketing collateral, competitive intelligence, etc. You can also retrieve files by who created it, who changed it last, and when it was last changed.
Believe me, you’ll never miss the File Treasure Hunt or the Search Dog.
2. Version Control
You pull a file off the server and work studiously for half a day on it. In the meantime, your co-worker pulls down the same file to make revisions. You save back to the server, and five minutes later so does he. There goes your work. Been there?
Or how about this? You are working on a proposal with your team. Everyone is sending their revisions as email attachments, with document names like Proposal_rev6bmike.doc. How that relates to Proposal_rev5camy.doc is anyone’s guess.
A document management system saves every version of every document. It eliminates the danger of losing your work in an overwritten file. Simple tables with revision numbers, authors and a date/time stamps replace emailed revisions with crazy names. Your team gets easy access to a document at any point in its history.
3. Flexible Access
Like all web-based tools, a document management system in the cloud gives you access to files anywhere you can get online. No more VPNs, remote control sessions or calls into the office to have a file emailed to you.
What’s more, these systems are accessed by a unique login for every user. These logins control what a user or group of users can do inside the system. You can restrict files for management eyes only, limit teams to the files they work on, or allow users to view a file but not change it. You get complete control over who can add, view, edit or delete files in the system.
4. Interaction with Clients
You can provide clients with unique logins to your document management system as well, limited to access only their files. They get persistent, online access to all of the current and historical work your company is doing for them. Imagine: designs, manuals, reports, meeting notes and more all nicely organized and available to your clients online, in a system with your company name and logo all over it.
With a document management system, you can set your company apart from your stone-age competitors who still resort to emailing or FTPing their files to clients.
5. Workflows
Files are made to go somewhere. You don’t want them to go on a file server and die. You also don’t want a file going out to clients after an intern spent 15 minutes drafting it up. Workflows enforce these kinds of rules automatically. A workflow can alert a supervisor that a proposal is ready for review, or an editor that an article needs attention. It can also tell your employees to read your newly updated HR policies or notify a client an item is ready for them.
Workflows transform a lake of files into a lot of little streams. The big pool of files that used to just sit on your server begin to flow to where they need to go, and stop at all the right places on the way.
Where to Start?
Two of the main commercial open source document management systems are KnowledgeTree and Alfresco. With the open source versions you don’t pay a license fee, but you will need either the in-house resources to run a server or a hosting provider to deliver the system as a service. For most small businesses the hosted model makes the most sense.
Industry specific document management systems abound. These more customized solutions can provide a better fit, but they also tend to be more expensive and can lock you in to a format and hosting provider.
As with most cloud solutions, the Savvy CIO’s company offers a document management system as well, best suited to our relational approach of tailoring open source solutions to our client’s specific needs.
Have experience with or questions about document management systems? Share it with us in the comments.
