In our regulated world today, there is no avoiding the need for better document control. Anyone familiar with the bite of Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II, SEC, HIPAA, and FRCP eDiscovery can quickly attest to this. One of our customers said it best in his comment about regulatory risk, “Every piece of paper is a liability waiting to happen if it gets misfiled or lost.”

But implementing a document control system offers even more than “being compliant” with the regulation du jour.

The usefulness of placing controls on information – regulating access, logging changes, managing distribution, automating actions in business processes – has operational and productivity benefits that extend well beyond the realm of regulatory compliance.

Consider this: How much time is spent by typical knowledge workers simply looking for lost documents, trying to locate documents they know exist but were created by others, or recreating versions that can’t be found? In an office where files are saved on personal drives, shared folders, and filing cabinets, versus one where documents are maintained in easily-accessible repositories with versioning and indexed searching, the time differences can be quantified in real terms by worker productivity.

This simplest of examples barely sheds light on the extent to which information accessibility, or its inaccessibility, influences productivity.

Even greater benefits are realized through process automation. Document control can automate repetitive business process that generate a paper trail. This includes virtually any process that has a review, notification, approval, or a multitude of other actions. Document control removes the user dependence from the process to make the process flow automatically. People focus on decisions, leaving technology to drive the process forward.

In advance of next week’s Autodesk University conference in Las Vegas, ColumbiaSoft made a pre-announcement today about an improved AutoCAD integration that is coming soon in the next version of Document Locator. It uses Autodesk RealDWG technology to offer faster performance of CAD file management within the Document Locator document management system.

Now, Document Locator already connects to AutoCAD, so this is an improvement of things that are already pretty good. The whole point here is to have a unified way to manage design files along with all the other documents, emails and files that make up a complete project in a single system.

For more information about today’s announcement, you can read a copy of the news release at: http://www.documentlocator.com/Company/News/11_24_08/. Te see a sneak peak, visit us at the Autodesk University conference December 2 through 5 in Las Vegas. We’ll be in booth 375 in the AEC area of the convention floor.

Document Locator customers now have a new resource to share and exchange ideas, seek help from other users, and find tips about their document management system in the new online Document Locator Forum.

The forum made its official public debut today as part of the new Document Locator Community Web site (which includes this blog, and soon a Wiki).

The forum hosts a range of interesting topics for Document Locator customers, including:

• Everyday Document Management
• Power Modules
• Scanning
• Admin Central
• Installs and Upgrades
• Infrastructure
• API Programming
• Wish List

If you are a current customer of Document Locator, vist the Community, click on the Forum button and request a registration.