Companies are increasingly relying upon remote employees driving their sales and customer service efforts. Embracing a geographically disbursed workforce makes perfect sense for both the employee and the employer because it promotes greater access to customers while reducing the costs of business real estate and travel expenditures. In addition, studies indicate that companies benefit from increased employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention as a result of allowing their employees to work outside of the office.
Providing a fast, scalable, and secure network infrastructure for remote employees requires that IT departments rethink their existing architectures. Historically corporate networks minimize their exposure to the outside world of hackers and malware by limiting entry points into the system from outside of the company’s firewall. However with the increased demand to support remote employees, IT departments are researching new technologies that improve how they control and manage information flow from offsite resources.
To that end, ColumbiaSoft is engaged in developing solutions for a handful of Fortune 500 companies that provide simple, secure online access to their enterprise document management systems. The user interfaces are tailored to specific roles in the organization in order to align the application functionality with the user’s specific job function. This customized design provides a quick and efficient means for looking up account information and uploading company critical documents in seconds.
The online portal solutions provided by ColumbiaSoft support interactive searching against a company’s backend database system including CRM, ERP, or Accounting application. By interfacing the document management system with other mission critical systems, the web interface design promotes minimal data entry along with accurate spelling and auto-populated supporting fields. ColumbiaSoft also provides web-based drag/drop functionality allowing users to quickly drag multiple attachment files from Microsoft Outlook or Windows Desktop environments directly into the clients’ document management system.
Storing corporate records in a document management system provides numerous benefits enterprise wide that support both management and IT functions within an organization. This includes fast searching on metadata and file content, records management capabilities, email archive, routing documents for digital signature and approval, compliance audit trails, version control, and much more. By providing simple, efficient solutions for external resources to share corporate documents, companies operate smarter and allow their workforce to focus on their core job functions.
