Improve Document Management ROI

The solution may be right in front of you

The same questions crop up time and time again:

• How do you collect feedback, co-author, and approve documents?

• How do you collaborate and share information when out and about, or in multiple locations?

• How do you share documents inside and outside your organisation?

• How can you find documents quickly ?

Many organisations have turned to or are looking at expensive document management systems (DMS) or off the shelf SaaS solutions to solve this issue. The irony is of course that after many organisations already embraced Microsoft 365, so already have an enterprise-grade document management system ready and waiting to be take advantage of within their current infrastructure – SharePoint Online.

SharePoint, when correctly configured, allows organisations and users to take advantage of a myriad of features as well as integrate seamlessly with collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams.

Sharing, security and safety

With SharePoint your documents are not only secure, but you can share them with individuals or teams, inside and outside your organisation. Security settings (permissions) can be set to global, team or even individual file level.

For example, a HR file can be shared with a single employee only. A folder can be shared with external clients or customers. Different sites can have different permissions meaning they can be kept read only for certain users, editable for others. Files without permissions can be hidden from searches ensuring only the right people see the right documents.

Discovery

One of the most common complaints about document management systems are that they don’t make life easier for the end user. Manually categorising data, having to follow predefined naming conventions or even working out how to find a document – without having to read its contents – are often cited as significant barriers to adoption within the organisation.

SharePoint enables the automatic classification and permissioning of documents through convention rather than configuration – storing documents in a given place might imply specific metadata, security classification, and sharing capabilities within the organisation.

Searching

Metadata gives the benefit of making it easy to find and surface documents that are relevant to each user, department, or project that is being worked on.

A McKinsey report into employee productivity found that the average employee spends 1 hour every day just searching for documents.