In order to build any structure, there are three key components: A good foundation, proper tools, and killed professionals. This is true when creating a towering sky scraper, humble home, or document structure that holds all of your firm’s intellectual property.
Building a Foundation
There are 4 important things to know about a good Document Management System (DMS):
- First it will create the organizational structure. The will save users the time of creating folders, and building the trees needed for documents. But more importantly it will eliminate the inconsistency between different users, and other human errors like duplicates and typos.
- Second, a true DMS will prevent users from breaking out of the structure provided by the DMS. Simply put, when a user saves a document the DMS will override the typical Windows save screen with its own type of save. So essentially, users are forced to save in the structure with no way to bypass the DMS. This forced save also guides users to a shared location that is backed up.
- Third it will provide a variety of ways for users to search for documents. A few of the common search options are, title, modified date, user, text in file, and profile type.
- Finally, a true DMS will have security options that will allow a user or groups to have restricted access to documents, features, folders, and settings
