Becoming paper free is the goal of both large and small offices, but the biggest challenge is to manage and control the digital docs, which can be a complicated task as dealing with physical files. A good document management software is the answer to this challenge of effectively sharing, storing, collaborating and ultimately eliminating any outdated records. SharePoint is a great tool for document management that is usually considered by many organizations as they are already using Microsoft products for various tasks.
What is SharePoint document management and what can you expect from it?
SharePoint document management is specifically designed to be an intranet and collaboration tool that is to offer a secure place to store, share, organize and also access any information easily. SharePoint is offered on premise, hybrid and cloud versions. It comes with a broad set of features and function sets and also has a constantly changing feature and complex licensing arrangements. It has been deployed alongside Microsoft Exchange, office web apps, Skype for business by mid-sized organizations and also large departments. Its primary distribution channel has been Office 365. Cloud based SharePoint was developed in order to improve the platform and to enhance the user experience and improve the search in a world where speed and personalization is expected.
How to use SharePoint for document management?
A feature rich document management system is a prime requirement for enterprises willing to streamline, automate and optimize the document driven process and also make the employees more productive.
Capture and validation:
Business organizations have to operate various unstructured data in varied formats like the JPG, TIFF or CAD files that cannot be searched by the content. In order to make handling such documents easy, it is important to make all the documents readable. This can be achieved through the integration of document management systems having OCR software. Integrated with OCR, SharePoint can offer high volume conversion of paper documents into digital document that are easily searchable and can also be classified, indexed and saved in the libraries.
Indexing:
In SharePoint, the documents undergo automatic indexing and this makes it easy to retrieve faster. The document management system allocates a unique ID to the document so that there is no confusion due to similar document names. It also supports creating many metadata fields for each document and this simplifies document’s storage, classifying and also search.
Storage:
Large enterprises, often need huge storage space for their digital documents and are also required to retain the confidential information about employees, clients and other business activities for some time. The data that is collected in SharePoint Online is called a list, which consists of list items and it has up to 30 million items. SharePoint supports most common type files and also works with file extensions like .odt, .ods, .ppsx that are rare. It also helps to optimize the content assets by automatically removing the useless files.
Collaboration:
Collaboration is a prime key document management features as it helps the employees to easily edit documents simultaneously and also see the changes via the colored bars and this finally increases the productivity. The platform is also known for its co-authoring capabilities and this allows the employees to work on corporate documents at the same time.
Regulatory compliance and security:
This is important for all business irrespective of the size. Enterprises need to consistently adjust their external and internal policies in order to ensure regulatory compliance. And non-compliance may lead to fines, confinement and even breach of contracts. SharePoint helps to control the people who can view, delete or edit the documents and establish a system having multiple permission levels for the users.
Distribution and retrieval:
All the document of any enterprise should be accessible 24 hours a day and from anywhere and any device. In order to stay competitive, business organizations should be flexible and quick in responding to the partners and customers and also distribute important documents in formats that are easy to change. SharePoint document management has an easy to use UI and is also available as a mobile version. Now even absence of the internet connection is not a problem as the users can work with documents offline. All the changes made to it offline will be synchronized once there is an internet connection.
