Imagine that you are applying for a new job in a company.
Now Imagine the pathways your application form will have to travel to get back to you a response.
First, it would pass through the firm’s HR manager, then to CEO, who would cross-check the form and send it back to HR seeking queries. Then to the panel of selectors.
And finally, it will settle in a file that holds the dust of thousands of such resumes for many years.
Now when you use SharePoint as a document management system, then the whole scene changes.
Before we move further, explore the benefits of using a document management system.
The Essentials of an Effective Document Management Solution
Now, let us look at what a modern DMS (Document Management System) can do to your dreary workplace.
The DMS is something that can clean up your workspace, add a different flavor to your work style, and make your employee’s life a lot better.
But what to look for in a DMS?
How to know that you are on the right path?
The best way, as it always is, when you don’t know about something, is to ask questions. So when you look for a DMS company, ask the questions as we have outlined in our graphic below.
The document management system that best answers these questions are bound to be right for your organization.
What does SharePoint Document Management mean to Your Enterprise?
Today businesses are moving online, and more than 65% of the world is on mobile.
Businesses across the world are moving online. The fact that you are doing something is no more important as it used to be. What matters now is how fast and efficiently you do it.
Hardly any organizations exist where documents are nil. The digitization drive has indeed thinned the stacks of files in our offices, but it has not eliminated the use of records. Reports in the electronic forms have now diversified as typing and copying are quite easy today.
DMS software is a technical solution to your workplace document problem. And there are plenty of companies offering DMS solutions based on many selected platforms. But here we discuss the unique qualities that a SharePoint based document service can add to your DMS software.
A SharePoint Document Management System uses the SharePoint server, and if combined with the new features of Office 365, it gives you a vibrant workspace.
If you are not aware of what SharePoint is, then you can go through our insightful blogs and step into the creative world of SharePoint development.
A SharePoint DMS software has some unique features which make it more sturdy and at the same time, agile to sort out document life cycles in your company. The remarkable features are :
1. Document Libraries
A convenient feature of the SharePoint Online that stores all your files the way you want to classify it. For example, if you want the records of a particular project to be listed together, you can modify the document library that way. And if you're going to arrange the files of your esteemed clients together, then that is another way of classifying it.
Co-authoring features in the document libraries lets you perform tasks simultaneously. If you are a software developing company or mobile app developers, then coauthoring can help you work on your Scrum Agile strategy with more speed and efficacy.
Besides this, the document libraries bring with it a host of amenities like tracking of file, activity updation on data, creating a customizable view for your document library, highlight file, link or folders in the library, and share files or folders seamlessly.
2. Plan Content Types
Before moving further, it is essential to understand what content types and workflows are because they are the very fabric of a SharePoint software.
Let’s get to know a workflow first.
Consider an ordinary document like an application form. When you receive a job applicant’s request, a workflow typically charts the path a report has to travel through the organization. The flowchart shows the route of a typical applicant’s document.
Now, a SharePoint server handles several such workflows in an organization. Hence, it is easy for your employees to handle documents because the document handles themselves. All they have to do is perform predefined operations on them.
Coming to the content type, it is a collection of metadata, workflow, and other specific categories of items that are available in a document library. Your organization may have a variety of documents like contracts, tasks, documents, etc. SharePoint lets you create a hierarchy of such materials according to your necessity.
3. Metadata Navigation
It can make your whole database simple to use and search. Metadata navigation is set up to quickly search files of similar types easily, with fewer keystrokes. The metadata navigation that sets for a library or group of documents displays a tree-like structure to guide you plan better. It appears on the left-hand side of the page. The tree also reveals the hierarchy of the content types, as previously discussed. The end effect is that the user gets to display content much dynamically.
4. Advanced Coauthoring
The Build 2019 saw a new benchmark in the world of co-authoring with the coming of Fluid Framework, which will intensify multi-person co-authoring with speed and at a scale that’s not achieved so far in the industry.
The Fluid Framework can add some remarkable features into your SharePoint document management system. For one thing, it will make the whole process swift and easy to handle.
Secondly, it provides a componentized document model where the writer can split the content and use them as building blocks for other documents or a new application or a project. Thus, it makes data picking much easier across your organization.
Thirdly, if you are targeting customers across various countries, then Microsoft is coming up with intelligent agents who will fetch text for you, translate documents, cross-check compliances, etc. It will be available across the whole Microsoft 365 platforms, Outlook, and Teams.
The Microsoft Pen itself was a revolution in creativity, and it gathered huge accolades from the developers and tech community of users. Watch the exciting clip to see how it spurs creativity.
5. A Better Word Experience
SharePoint will be a productive move for your company if they have employees working on Word Online. The Ides in Word that combines Office 365 features employees artificial intelligence and machine learning to make every document created in your organization more refined, professional.
It's a common observation that users often ignore tools in the Word, which makes writing much more comfortable. For example, instead of using the section heads to structure their documents, employees go on bolding each subtitle manually. Another feature is the acronym identification using usage rates, highlight extracts, and the average reading time.
6. The Neural Writing
Not everyone is a great writer. You may hire exceptional content writers or freelance marketers for handling the site content, your blogs and marketing requirements. But it is not pragmatic to keep a content writer to parse your everyday office files.
SharePoint integrated Office 365 solutions bring you a smart way of writing quality documents, and it used neural writing to assist your employees in making standard responses and written documents.
The features use the technology behind synonym suggestions and build on enhancing the sentence with better words through machine learning. The way neural technology is going, it is there to augment the skills so that it adds value to your employee’s work.
Top 10 Benefits of Using SharePoint as a Document Management System
We have seen the remarkable features of SharePoint that make it an efficient document management system. There is no doubt regarding the fact that it increases the productivity of an organization with its centralized document storage and consistent workflow.
Let's take a look at the top 10 benefits of using SharePoint as a document management system.
1. Security
Paper documents are the least secure. They are easy to access, manipulate, and are always at a risk of hazards.
Even digital documents like emails are not very secure. Your organization's sensitive information is at risk in email communications.
SharePoint provides an alternative to this by creating a secure document management system. By integrating features like access control and cloud backup, SharePoint ensures that your documents are accessible by only authorized people and can be recovered in the face of any potential data loss.
2. Storage
Storing documents in a paper format is a headache! It takes a lot of physical space and can be time consuming to access and organize.
Digital documentation saves organizations from this trouble. But then again, if not managed properly, it can take up a lot of digital space.
A document management system like SharePoint helps to organize documents better so that unwanted spaces can be freed and documents can be managed more effectively. This also makes it easy to access the documents whenever needed, in a quick way.
3. Single Sign-On
Using the Single Sign-on feature, SharePoint users can use their account with a single set of login credentials. It helps to minimize phishing attacks and enhances integration by eliminating the need to manage multiple softwares and systems.
4. Version History
In an organization, it is natural that we keep updating old documents by making changes with time. Sometimes it might get difficult to find the most recently updated one or there would be situations where we need to refer to the old versions.
SharePoint's version history can come really beneficial in such circumstances. With documents being stored in a central location, employees with access can edit those documents and update them in the same place. This avoids the occurrence of any confusion.
SharePoint will record all details of every version including who edited it and when. It is also possible to recover old versions if needed.
5. Easy Collaboration
A document management system syncs your entire workplace, so sharing information becomes easy. Collaborating within teams becomes convenient as documents can be shared with anyone during any time.
When collaboration becomes fast and happens in real-time, it enhances productivity. Thus SharePoint helps to bring the best out of employees as individuals and as team members.
6. Automation
In a non-digitized work atmosphere, a lot of time is lost in manual processes like error correction, approval, etc. In SharePoint, the workflow is automated in such a way that the need for human intervention in such tasks are eliminated.
This makes the work processes more efficient and fast. There is no need to wait for approvals or manually check for errors. The automated flowchart makes workflow standard and systematic.
7. Effective Organisation
With a document management system, your documents stay properly organized. In such a structure, it is easy to find precisely what you are looking for.
And besides this overall organisation, the search functionality implemented in softwares like SharePoint makes finding documents easier. You can search using keywords or phrases and get results in a matter of seconds.
8. Co-Authoring
In SharePoint, it is possible for multiple users to edit the same document at the same time. This is called co-authoring. Co-authoring makes teamwork fast and more efficient.
To ensure that all the changes from various sources are shared, it uses an intelligent locking system on the documents. This lock system locks the specific sections where some edit is being done so that it does not get lost. Thus multiple users can work on different sections of the same document at the same time.
9. Access Permissions
SharePoint has pervasive permission settings. You can share documents with individuals or teams as well as share individual files or folders.
These permissions settings are so secure that a person without access cannot open a document. In fact, permission can be set in such a way that a person will not even be able to even find a document if he is unauthorized.
10. Follow Regulations
Some documents will have to follow certain regulations. Complying with those regulations is essential for them; otherwise, the documents may not be accepted.
Document management systems have specific templates or presets that make sticking to the regulations easy. It enables employees to create documents at their convenience without having to worry about regulations.
What Makes SharePoint the Right Choice for a Document Management System?
There are several document management systems in the market. But SharePoint stands out among them all.
78% of Fortune 500 companies use SharePoint for their organization.
What makes it the ideal choice for a document management system? Let's take a look!
- This product of Microsoft has state of the art document management system, making it popular among big organizations worldwide.
- It is compatible with several other Microsoft products. This makes integration easy and opens up many opportunities.
- Organizations can customise SharePoint according to their specific requirements. This flexibility makes several businesses choose SharePoint as their document management system.
- SharePoint can also be accessed on mobile devices. In this smartphone era, this is a much-needed feature that increases convenience and accessibility.
- SharePoint offers a massive amount of storage space. Large organizations use SharePoint because of this big storage capacity.
- SharePoint has reported minimum errors, such as server issues, accidental data loss, or insecure storage. This makes it very reliable.
- Its advanced search feature takes finding documents to another level. SharePoint makes search precise, easy, and quick.
- SharePoint is continuously working on its growth to accommodate the latest innovations and provide the best of document management to its users.
A document management system adds to your impeccable arsenal making your workforce more productive, efficient, and valuable. Many platforms build document management system today.
But the above discussion proves why SharePoint is your best bet. The very fact that the whole force of the pioneers of technology the Microsoft Corporation is behind it is one thing. The rapid workplace innovations that it is bringing each year is another thing.
Among the SharePoint service providers, Aufait Technologies has a distinctive position. The genius of the company reflects in its Microsoft Gold Partnership. Its near two-decade experience is serving world-class clients like Oman Air, Boston Scientific, Legrand, Qatar Foundation, etc. This is another reason that Aufait is the right guide for you.