Collaboration is one of the essential things one must keep
in mind with your small business setups; whether you are sharing your
information with your co-workers or your business partners internationally –
exchange of files is a risky thing and can get messy.
You need to be sure you are not losing data, being confident
that the other party is getting everything else that goes with the
collaboration, many of you will feel that simple email sharing doesn’t suffice.
Should you use proper tools like Sugar Sync or Dropbox? Or should you think
about making use of a document management system (DMS)? Here are some factors
that you should consider when deciding between document management software and
file sharing.
Security
Security is one of the main things when it comes to
documenting handling. With a simple file sharing method, you can secure a
shared directory and restrict access to the file. Document management system, on the other hand, offers more security
features. You can decide who can edit, add and delete files, and of course, you
get notifications regarding the changes made in the document.
Taxonomy
The naming of the files is a huge issue with the file
sharing software’s because it depends on the creator. Just imagine how
difficult it can be to find a folder just with its name in some countless files
and folders. It’s hard, right? DMS systems, however, make this task quite
easier because they can use standardised naming resolution and apply the use of
required fields.
Revision Control
Revision control is another important factor, because it’s
always better to have the previous version of the files along with the new
version, just in case the original one is better than the revised file. That’s
another thing which secure document
management systems are better than the file sharing.
Scanning Capabilities
There are some other better points that speak of the
document management systems; it is how they handle the scanned documents.
Surely, it would be a great option for businesses to go completely paperless,
however, this is not a possibility. So the thing is you need to scan a lot of
documents to have a digital archive, and that is exactly where DMS serves as a
great help. Scan the document, and if you have good enough DMS software, it
will OCR the file so that you have a find able digital copy of the documents,
opposed to the standard .jpg files in a shared file system.
Control
The main benefit of having access to your files and have
full liberty to share them in not in how many files you can share and store,
but it is in what you can do with those files once you have access to them.
Document management system offers tools like workflow computerisation that
allows the content to more around your organisation based on the events or
pre-set rules. It also provides the automated hold of email, web forms and also
prints output in some cases.
This is just a trailer of what collaboration and file
organisation has to offer, but once you start using a document management software, you will start to realise more
advantages of it as compared to file sharing.
It will change your business from an unorganised pile of papers and
files into an appropriately structured and searchable digital storage.
