Building a greener world with a Document Management System

In today’s fast-paced digital world, businesses of all sizes constantly look for ways to improve their operations, streamline their processes, and boost their productivity. Organizations worldwide understand our impact on our planet and consistently strive to reduce our carbon footprint. 

Going paperless is often the first step most organizations take in the eco-friendly journey. However, as easy as creating electronic documents is, managing them for reuse, storage, archival, and retrieval is a different headache to deal with altogether. This is where digital document management and document management systems come in.

What is a Document Management System (DMS)?

Document management is the process of creating, storing, organizing, securing, and retrieving electronic documents and files. A DMS is a software that provides a centralized platform for creating, storing, organizing, and retrieving electronic documents and files. Document management systems allow organizations to manage their electronic documents in a more organized, secure, and efficient manner than traditional paper-based systems. You can use it to manage a wide range of electronic documents, including spreadsheets, presentations, emails, reports, and more.

Why choose a document management system instead of a shared drive?

While a shared drive can be useful for storing and sharing files, a document management system offers several advantages over a shared drive. Here are a few reasons why you might choose a document management system instead:

• Improved Collaboration: A document management system provides enhanced collaboration capabilities by enabling team members to work simultaneously on documents, track changes, and maintain version control.

• Better Security: Document management systems offer greater security features than shared drives. They allow for controlled access to documents, encryption of sensitive files, and the ability to track and audit access to documents, helping to ensure that only authorized individuals have access to sensitive information.

• Compliance and Audit Support: Document management systems help track a document’s history from creation to edits and downloads, providing an audit trail that can be critical for compliance purposes and during audits.

• Easy Access to Information: Document management systems typically have robust search functionality, making it easy for teams to find the right documents when they need them.

• Increased Productivity: Document management systems allow employees to quickly and easily find the documents they need, reducing the time and effort spent searching for files across multiple platforms. Additionally, collaborating on documents in real time can improve team productivity significantly.

What should you look for while choosing a Document Management System?

Unless your organization has specialized needs requiring a specific type of DMS, there are some standard features you must look for while evaluating a document management system. These features include:

• Document storage and retrieval: Users can easily store, organize, and retrieve electronic documents with capabilities such as drag-and-drop file uploads, metadata tagging, and advanced search.

• Version control: Version control capabilities ensure that the latest version of a document is available to all users and that previous versions are also accessible if needed. Version control also helps to see the historical progression of document creation.

• Collaboration tools: It is essential for every DMS to facilitate collaboration among users by allowing them to co-author and edit documents in real-time and leave comments and feedback on documents.

• Security and access control: A DMS should have robust security features, such as user authentication, encryption, and access control, to ensure that only authorized users can access documents.

• Workflow automation: Automating redundant document workflows, such as approvals, notifications, and task assignments, removes process-related bottlenecks in your document production and management process. Workflow automation also helps organizations to boost transparency and drive efficiency throughout the document management lifecycle.

• Compliance and auditing: Compliance with regulations and internal policies, including audit trails, document retention policies, and data protection is essential for every DMS. 

• Integration with other systems: The DMS you choose must integrate easily with other business systems, such as CRM or ERP systems, to streamline workflows and improve document access across your organization.

• Analytics and reporting: Analytics and reportage are essential for any document management system. These features enable users to analyze document usage, monitor performance, and track compliance.

• High availability: No one likes to stare at a 404 page or a service that is unavailable. Ensure that the cloud-based DMS platform offers high uptime and availability. 

Why choose a document management system from Clavis?

With over two decades of experience in publishing and document management, Clavis understands your needs better. With our background in the publishing industry, we understand the nuances of document production—and what our customers need from a world-class, highly available document management solution.

Our DMS engineering teams have spent years ensuring a stable DMS platform that is there for you when you need it the most. We’ve baked in the safety and security you need with every product you choose from our portfolio so you can boost your organization’s productivity with confidence.

In the unlikely event that our standard, highly configurable DMS platform does not suit your exacting requirements, our engineers and project managers are ready to understand your needs so we can help you create a custom solution that works best for you.

Final thoughts

In today’s digital age, managing and organizing electronic documents is increasingly critical for organizations of all sizes. A robust DMS can offer features such as version control, search functionality, collaboration tools, and security controls that are essential for most organizations.

The engineering team at Clavis is here to help you transform your paper-based repository into a digital one. Give us a call, email us or reach out to our team <here>, and we will help you take the first steps towards choosing and implementing a highly secure, world-class document management system. 

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