How much time does it take to manage documents in your company?

Documents are one of the most important information storage in companies. They are exchanged with contractors, offices and are often used within organization. Documents take part in almost every business process. Efficiency of processes, quality of collaboration with contractors – these elements are affected by efficiency of document flow and management.

For many companies document workflow and document management is the critical element of success – that is the point of view of 8 out of 10 managers. Despite of this fact only 10% of companies can calculate costs of document workflow correctly. These costs do not consist only from material price but also from costs of effort put in document workflow.

Does your company have electronic document workflow and management system?

Nowadays almost every company stores part of its documents in electronic form. Text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, forms are kept as computer files before they are printed. If the computer has a mail client installed and an internet access we can say such computer has the most common electronic document workflow system – sending emails with attachments.

Unfortunately usage of documents in such form is limited, especially when it comes to use the document again in the future. Searching in such documents and giving wider access to them is also difficult while one uses only email. Monitoring process status in which such documents takes part is impossible using this technique.

What benefits can your company receive?

We think that solution based on SharePoint 2007 can refund during first year of investment. By using electronic document workflow your company will:

• make use of time which is currently wasted on searching and getting access to information
• reduce duration of the processes by using advanced monitoring techniques
• make use of office space which is currently covered by documents
• reduce costs of office materials
• get the possibility of remote document access

How SharePoint 2007 can help your company?

Increase of your team’s productivity thanks to easy-in-use tools for team collaboration.
Document workspace allows gathering source documents and other information needed to create the document. Creating the document by a group of people is much easier. SharePoint calendars and tasks are synchronized with Outlook what makes time management, event and meeting planning, task assignment and their status control much easier. Synchronization of contacts will ensure that the addresses base will always be up to date and allow these contacts to be shared by whole team. Users of mobile systems can use mobile views of SharePoint, what makes usage of it clear on mobile devices.

Easier collaboration on documents and storage.
Working on a document in a group is simplified by using versioning and content approval features. One can browse previous versions of a document and return one of them if it is needed. You can always give yourself exclusive right to modify the document, while others can only read it. If you need to work on documents outside the office, you can always get offline version of a document and synchronize it later with SharePoint database.
In SharePoint based systems, above normal attributes of document like file name, author, date of creation and date of last modification, documents can have numerous of user defined attributes, like department, contractor, status. It is up to you to decide what attributes your document will have. One can filter and sort document using previously defined columns.

Simple, compact and familiar user interface.
SharePoint documents can be accessed through web browser, Outlook folders and classic shared folders. If your users are used to shared folders, they can use this view until they will use whole functionality of SharePoint www interface. If you need to modify fast large number of document attributes or copy them to Excel spreadsheet, you can use copy-paste method In datasheet view of SharePoint documents. All operations of opening and saving documents by Office package elements are being made within SharePoint sites. There is no need for downloading files to the computer hard drive. That makes applying changes faster and more convenient.

Reducing idle time by usage of alerts.
Alerts in SharePoint document libraries will notify you about chosen events – newly created documents, deletion or modifying one that was contained by a library. It is up to you to decide if the alert has to be sent immediately or once a certain period of time as a daily or weekly report. Workflow of SharePoint system behaves like “silent employee”. He will notify or assign others to the tasks in particular stages of document workflow. He will perform certain activities automatically like sending document to archive or filling document attributes. You can design your own workflows in SharePoint Designer 2007 program.

Sharing the documents without revealing classified information.
SharePoint security model allows to set permissions to web sites, lists and libraries as well as particular list elements. You have full control, you can decide who can browse and read the documents, who can create them and who can modify and approve their content. These permissions can be set by dedicated users or this can be done by Workflows. By using access zones in SharePoint sites it is possible to set different permissions based on where the connection came from. Using safe SSL protocol and logging methods other than Active Directory allows you to create collaboration sites with your contractors without necessity of giving them accounts in domain and without risk of snaffling data or passwords.