How Document Management Software Can Help Your Business

Documents and paperwork pile up fast for small business owners and entrepreneurs of all sizes, with both paper and electronic files often becoming overwhelming. Thankfully, document management software (DMS) can organize your data and put documents at your fingertips in seconds.
“Today’s workers are becoming increasingly digital—they’re computer literate and more mobile than ever, dependent on technology to help improve their productivity,” says Barrie Hadfield, CTO at Workshare. “Using software for document management is becoming crucial in all industries.”
Innovative document management software offers a single repository to store your documents, with multiple folders available that can be accessed by any number of authorized parties.
One of the key business advantages of this technology is being able to mobilize content through integrated enterprise applications, extending your document access and collaboration capabilities beyond the corporate firewall. Greater accessibility and mobility means workflows are more flexible, and your employees can be more efficient when working with others internally or externally.
According to a recent survey by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), more than 96 percent of IT professionals use mobile devices to access documents on the move. In today’s Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) era, many workers expect to be able to access and collaborate on documents, anytime, from anywhere, on any device. This means the most effective DMS’s are cloud-based, connecting your employees with the level of accessibility they require to be productive when working remotely.
“Traditional document management systems are primarily used for document storage and filing, but businesses can extend these systems and enhance their usability by integrating with applications that provide a layer of collaboration functionality,” Hadfield explains. “Workshare, for instance, provides enterprise collaboration applications that enable file sharing and synchronization across devices, document comparison, and review capabilities. Automatic syncing capabilities ensures that groups are always working off the most recent version – something that becomes somewhat of a challenge when relying on just email.”
Another big advantage to document management systems comes from improved security. While most workers are accustomed to using channels like email or consumer-grade “freemium” file-sharing services to send and collaborate on documents, the fact is they simply haven’t been designed with security in mind.
“Collaboration applications that integrate with the DMS ensure greater control over data and content through encryption, limited access settings, and password protection,” Hadfield says. “This also ensures that IT can maintain an audit trail to track who has viewed, modified or shared a document along its journey through review cycles.”
Document management systems are the core to any knowledge-based business, and hold its most valuable asset—data. However, in today’s mobile world, businesses do need to modernize their existing systems in order to strike the balance between meeting IT’s need for security with employees’ demands for usability.
“For employees to truly achieve enhanced efficiency, IT should add a host of review, collaboration and document control features to their DMS,” Hadfield says. “Integrating these functionalities also helps drive user adoption, generating greater ROI for the business and steering users away from risky, consumer-grade services.”