How a Web Based Document Management System Enables Collaboration In Your Organization

Project teams use documents to communicate and publish their ideas, options, alternatives, and solutions. Team members are not always in the same building, state, province or country; and it is sometimes the case that they do not all work for the same company.

So how can a geographically dispersed team with no access to a common network drive share documents? The solution is usually email. A team member creates an initial version of a document and it is passed around as an email attachment, going through several revisions until finalized. Each team member then stores the document in a folder on their local or network drive; document versioning often means having several copies of the same document stored in an inbox or on a hard drive. This too is not an optimal solution.

An optimal document management solution offers the following advantages

Versioning- Documents stored are automatically versioned. Prior versions are always just a mouse click away.

Security –allows the application of role or user based security from the root folder to the document level. This means that a document residing in a role-secured folder can be made inaccessible to that role.

Workflow - Collaboration is enabled and enhanced by the workflow model . Teams can utilize existing workflow structures or create their own.

Accessibility – Customers and Partners are able to access shared documents through your organization’s portal.

Discussion Forums – The problem of collaborating across time zones and firewalls is solved by built in discussion forums and blogging

Subscriptions – Team members are relieved of the responsibility for informing others when they have added a new document or made a change to an existing document. A subscription to the team folder provides automatic notification of additions, deletions, and updates to folders, sub-folders and/or documents.