Gone are the days when offices used to be filled with files and documents. Most of the office area used to be occupied with files; in cabinets, drawers, open racks or piled up depending on importance of those files. Any business, small or big, has to maintain files, be it for record-keeping or audits or any purpose. Thanks to Document Management Systems! Businesses have got rid of maintaining and managing the documents.
Document Management System (DMS) goes much beyond simply saving everything online. There are a variety of DMS softwares in market today. Depending on nature and size of business, you can decide which features you should look for in a DMS. Since BootSimply Solutions (http://bootsimply.com/) is a startup building its own product(RESTFiddle) as well as serves custom software solutions, Google Drive and Docs serve all our DMS needs. Here is what you can expect from any DMS (and Google Drive as well):
Safe Storage:
Scanning and saving documents prevents the danger of physical damage due to repeated handling or due to any disaster. Offices where applications or archived data are stored in large number, DMS proves to be extremely useful. Since all the DMS docs get stored in cloud servers that usually have backups, there is absolutely zero risk in documents getting damaged or lost.
Data is with Correct Set of People:
Security is of utmost importance when it comes to any sort of data. Some of the data needs to be handled very carefully, especially regarding confidential documents or non-disclosure agreements or sign-off of deals. It is very crucial that only the right set of people have access to that data.
Document Accessibility Ease:
Once the documents are stored in DMS, they can be accessed from anywhere. All you need is internet and DMS credentials! The authorized person can get the required data at any point of time since data becomes portable using DMS.
Increased Productivity:
Since the documents or information is at fingertips, the time wasted in searching and gathering all the needed info gets avoided. Obviously you get more time to focus on your main work. Often DMS are integrated with organization’s software suite due to which explicit uploading of documents is not required.
Centralized and Uniform Source of Information:
All the employees can access the authorized data, which remains the same for anyone.
Collaborate and Work as a Team:
Once the data is stored on server, it is available to all who are authorized to do so. All the historic data is available to all of them. This boosts productivity as a team since everyone is in sync.
Easy Searching of Information:
The documents can be grouped together as categories. They can be sorted by timestamp. Most of the DMS solutions provide free text search. Advanced searching facilities like owner of document, last handled by, document size, name etc. are provided by DMS.
Go Green:
We may not take extra efforts of planting trees, but we can definitely save them by consuming bare minimum paper.
Using online document management software gives us clear edge over traditional file management methods- cost savings, office space utilization, increased productivity, quick and easy access to information, eco-friendly solution and much more. Scanning, storage, retrieval, sharing and tracking of information gets easier. Every office is sure to be benefited by DMS, but especially those in insurance, telecom, government, complaint board and sales & marketing will reap maximum benefit from it.
There are a few more free tools which we use at BootSimply Solutions that help us boost our productivity:
Asana: As soon as there is more than 1 person working on project, collaboration comes into picture. I remember, during early years at job, how many emails used to bounce back and forth for collaborating! It was time-consuming. Now we have many apps which solve this collaboration issue. Most of them are either paid or have limit on number of users or have limited features for free use. Asana is the best fit for our needs. Indeed it is Teamwork without email. It is free upto 15 users. So by the time we do not exceed this number, we will continue with free Asana.
Evernote: This is a superb note-making tool. I use this extensively. I’ve some notebooks shared while some are my personal. Apart from notes, we save screenshots here. We usually tag the notes from shared notebooks. For personal use, I simply use it like a offline notebook- write and write. With so many tasks, one or the other can easily slip out of our minds. So just open Evernote and write!
Moqups: We usually start with paper and pencil while discussing the design with rest of the team. Once done on paper we switch to tool. Moqups is a simple, clean and useful tool for wireframing. Built with HTML5, it is free and has great interface.
Blogger & Skype: Blogger is our blogging platform. We mainly use Skype for office related conversations. We’ve reserved Google Hangouts for friends!
A common thing between the tools that we are using- there is minimal dependency (in fact no dependency at all ) on a specific machine. Everything can be accessed from anywhere. You just need to login!
