Today, following just a few weeks on the heels of our release of the latest version of document management software and the announcement that it would support new email compliance technology, ColumbiaSoft announced the launch of an entirely new product called Email Archive.

Email Archive is designed to help companies that are concerned with the ever-increasing importance of email compliance and the speed with which email records can be retrieved. It can operate either as an independent system, or in conjunction with a unified approach for records management that covers information of all kinds regardless of source or file type.

Read a copy of today’s Email Archive news announcement, and learn more about the Email Archive product.

Investing in document management can help your company meet the challenges of today and tomorrow as the following story illustrates.

One of ColumbiaSoft’s real estate investment customers recently expanded their use of Document Locator to meet additional compliance regulations.  The customer originally deployed document management to provide their Real Estate Development group with the tools to track and manage engineering contracts and drawings.  That implementation proved successful and laid the ground work for expanding their use of Document Locator in other areas of the company.

Shortly after rolling out Document Locator in the development group, the organization was acquired by a multinational investment firm headquartered in Japan.  As a wholly-owned subsidiary of a Japanese corporation, the company’s internal and external communications became subject to the regulatory guidelines of Japanese law.  Most notably, they were required to comply with J-SOX.  J-SOX (Japanese Sarbanes Oxley), which became law in 2006, requires internal controls over financial reporting as mandated by the Japanese Financial Instruments and Exchange Law.

After meeting with auditors and reviewing the features included with the latest version of Document Locator, the company realized that they already possessed the tools and knowledge required to fulfill J-SOX’s compliance regulations.  A  repository for Document Locator was developed that mapped J-SOX procedures to Document Locator features including workflow, security, scan processes, and document audit logs.  The model implementation was then audited by internal and external compliance officers who found that the policies and procedures implemented by Document Locator met J-SOX requirements.

The company is now in the process of deploying the solution enterprise wide.  Partnering with ColumbiaSoft has enabled this real estate investment customer to spend less time dealing with compliance issues and more time focusing on their core business – developing and managing commercial real estate.

The recent solvency and credit crisis resulting in $85B in government secured loans at AIG has affected valuations on Wall Street, brought skepticism to Main Street, and threatened to undermine the insurability of tens of thousands of AIG’s customers. For one AIG-insured Document Locator customer, however, the debacle raised immediate concerns that the fallout could leave them in violation of major environmental consulting contracts resulting from AIG’s diminishing credit rating.

To ensure they remained in compliance with their contractual obligations, the executive team ordered a comprehensive legal review of their largest contracts. The request for the contracts was fulfilled by a corporate paralegal using Document Locator. With the metadata attributes consistently applied to their documents, isolating the contract documents for their larger clients was straightforward. The paralegal retrieved and distributed the contract documents before the conversation among upper management who were requesting the documents had even concluded.

The company’s primary Document Locator user says that requests like this were significant challenges for them in the past before implementing document management. This was just another example of how their organization benefits daily from utilizing Document Locator.

The road to true collaboration with your business partners begins with developing an exceptional system of internal controls. For document intensive organizations, those controls are implemented using a robust document management system. When selecting a document management system for your organization, you will want to research systems that support collaboration as well as metadata indexing, workflow routing, fast searching, document audit logs, records management, and business rules enforcement.

Companies with fully deployed document management systems recognize the benefits of their implementation immediately. Repetitive tasks that involve searching for and/or distributing company documents can be performed in a matter of seconds by a single employee. Implementing agreed-upon standards for storing, naming, and profiling documents means less time searching for documents and more time focusing on what makes the company money. The list of benefits an organization will achieve is quite remarkable. The question that inevitably emerges is how to connect your internal business processes with resources on the outside of the organization.

The capacity to collaborate with resources, both inside and outside of the organization, while maintaining your internal business controls is king. Collaboration is the means to efficiently communicate and share data with your outside vendors and/or suppliers in a consistent and auditable format. Your success with collaboration depends upon whether you have the necessary tools to provide a secure, intuitive portal for easily uploading and retrieving documents and for involving external users in workflows.

Advanced collaboration solutions also offer tools for distributing bulk documents to resources for the purposes of document turnover, transmittals, or e-Discovery. This technology is used for extracting entire projects or folder directory structures from within a document management system and exporting the information to an external storage device – CD, DVD, thumb drive, or USB hard drive. The documents are accessed through a self-contained, searchable document archive that presents the complete folder and file hierarchy, metadata information, and a robust search function. All of this functionality is available to the data recipient without requiring any special software installation process.

Leveraging collaboration tools in your organization will improve your ability to produce the goods or services that drive revenue. Collaborative tools provide real-time data sharing with your vendors and suppliers. This improves your overall efficiency while reducing risk. Bulk document distribution functionality allows your organization to provide a greater level of service to your customers and therefore a strategic advantage over the competition. Implementing a document management system with collaboration has proven valuable to many organizations across a broad range of industries.

So here’s a recent success story worth a mention: A manufacturing company that implemented Document Locator into their Quality department received a higher return on investment than they anticipated. The process resulted in the company receiving accreditation for selling their manufactured products into a lucrative new market.

The primary business driver for purchasing document management was to strengthen document control activities for the Quality department. To that end, the company concentrated their deployment on building controls around approval processes, folder structure standards, metadata indexing, document security, audit trails, and automatic change notifications.

Since completing their deployment of Document Locator, the company has fulfilled the necessary Nuclear Quality Assurance audits for being a supplier to construction companies building nuclear power plants. As they communicated to ColumbiaSoft, they would have never passed the audits without the capabilities and auditability of their document management system.

Congratulations to ColumbiaSoft Corporation and its visionary founder, Richard Day, on this the company’s 10th anniversary!  ColumbiaSoft was founded on September 9, 1998 by Day, former owner and president of PED Manufacturing, one of the nation’s leading producers of orthopedic prosthetics.  Day’s vision: to create a new breed of document management that included enterprise-level functionality and performance at a price point that is accessible to any sized business.

In 1998 the document management industry was dominated by a handful of vendors offering solutions geared exclusively towards the Fortune 100.  This is also when I also began my career in document management specializing in imaging and workflow automation.  My introduction to document management was in working with several of America’s largest insurance companies helping them automate insurance processing workflows.  These engagements involved setting up scanning in their mailrooms, where in some instances they were processing over 5,000 mail items daily, and then automatically routing the digital images via customized workflows throughout the organization.

Early in 2001 I was fortunate enough to have been introduced to ColumbiaSoft where I immediately connected with the vision of expanding document management functionality to businesses of all sizes.  The time was right!  Intel-based PC computers and servers were growing exponentially in power and database engines required to host the technology were making enormous inroads.  At that point in my career I had worked almost exclusively on document management systems designed to run on AS/400 mainframe style computers – systems that were financially unattainable to most organizations.  I knew first-hand the benefits my previous customers realized using document management and wanted to become part of an organization that has the objective of making this technology affordable to businesses of all sizes.

Now 10 years old, ColumbiaSoft continues to deliver on the vision Richard Day established from the onset.  ColumbiaSoft has grown into a recognized leader in the document management industry by providing solutions to many thousands far and wide across numerous industries and countries.  With the advances in technologies in software and hardware, even small to medium sized businesses can now implement document management systems at reasonable prices that just ten years ago were seven figure investments.  I take my hat off to ColumbiaSoft and all of the employees who work tirelessly to push the envelope of document management!

After nine months of planning, coding, QA testing, and Beta evaluations… the big day is finally here: Today ColumbiaSoft released its ninth edition of our document management software – Document Locator Version 5.2. For those who are interested in:

• Email compliance, discovery or retrieval,
• Document delivery (file hand-off),
• Adobe Acrobat integration and digital signatures, or
• Improved document workflow

… This release will be especially interesting to you.

Check out our Web site to learn more about the latest version, and also read today’s Document Locator v5.2 press announcement.

For employees whose job dictates that they regularly create new documents, having access to an intuitive and easy to use version control system is a major advantage. Early in my career I distinctly remember the struggles I experienced creating specification documents, training guides, and other business related documentation. Authoring the content was challenging enough, but the issues were compounded by the processes associated with saving revisions, routing the documents for approvals, and distributing the final version to the intended recipients.

Version control is defined by Wikipedia as “the management of multiple revisions of the same unit of information.” While that definition is accurate, I think my brother put it best when he said “version control is akin to having unlimited edit-undo.” When creating documents using a version control system, the author has the capability of recording snapshots of their document at any point in the document lifecycle. This permits the author to lock in a version of the document for historical purposes that can be referenced later in the development cycle. Having access to snapshots of the document is especially helpful when the author needs to rewrite or remove a section of a document. Prior to working with a document management system, I am embarrassed to admit to the number of times I removed entire sections of a document without saving off a version of the file. Deleting sections from a document inevitably leads to rework and it did for me countless times.

The symptoms of a business needing a version control system are easy to recognize. The primary symptom is when users have file names saved with special extensions detailing the file version’s “something” (date, editor’s initials, or internal revision number). Experienced document authors compensate for not having a document management system by developing their own naming conventions for each document revision. As a result, their ‘My Documents’ folder is littered with countless revisions of documents using specialized file naming conventions such as filename – date – revision.ext. Modifying file names can partially address the individual author’s version control needs, but invariably leads to wide-scale confusion across an organization. The confusion is exacerbated when versions of files are emailed to others in the organization responsible for editing and/or approving the documents. Often the email recipients save a local copy of the file using yet another naming standard before performing their edits. When the files are returned, the original author now has a trail of dissimilar named files that require manual consolidation and cannot be easily audited.

In engineering and software departments, version control systems have been commonly used for decades. One Tree Software, in the early 1990s, developed the most prolific version control system for application engineers called ‘SourceSafe’ for Windows. One Tree Software was subsequently purchased by Microsoft and the SourceSafe application became integrated as part of Microsoft Visual Studio (Microsoft’s software development application suite) since 1995. Visual SourceSafe (VSS) became a widely adopted tool for managing versions of source code files, but never gained popularity with users outside of the engineering and software development teams.

The document management industry recognized the benefits that engineers were experiencing with version control and sought to bring equivalent functionality to the rest of the business community. Before that vision would be realized, a new breed of intuitive, integrated document management system needed to be developed that supported how document creators produced content. Business users required the essential version control features that engineers had come to expect such as saving revisions of documents, notes for detailing specific versions of the file, and the capability to promote historical versions of a file. However unlike the engineers, the business users also demanded advanced document management functionality including integration into Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat applications, electronic workflow for routing documents, electronic review and approval, digital signatures, document retention schedules, and profiling with metadata indexing.

Today business users have the opportunity to deploy a document management system that provides their users with robust version control functionality. Document creators from diverse industries gain notable efficiencies by utilizing a version control system for maintaining revisions of their documents. The benefits they realize include having access to all historical data associated with the document being generated, a complete document log detailing who and when a document was accessed, and the assurance that all of the versions of the document are stacked in the document’s version history and not concealed through varied naming standards. Can your organization afford not to provide your document authors with the tools they need to efficiently and confidently create the documents that drive your organization?