Time and time again, we are approached by prospective customers who want nothing more than to escape the shackles of their existing system and find a better document management system. They're frustrated with their legacy system’s functionality, interface design, and the "customer-no-service". Having experienced the drawbacks of their existing systems, they are easily attracted to one with a user-oriented design,...
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...
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...
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...
Document management systems provide users the capability to index documents using metadata attributes. These index attributes, when applied in a consistent fashion, can provide users with the capability to quickly find and retrieve associated documents. The question is... how do you enforce consistent metadata indexing for all of your documents? Relying on free-form text to index documents in an environment...
Included in Document Locator v5.2 are several enhancements to the workflow system. One enhancement already generating enormous fanfare in the user community is the overhauled notification system. Previous generations of Document Locator dutifully rendered and distributed email messages to the appropriate users notifying them based on the required task. These notifications included relevant information such as workflow task details, file...
The term ‘document management’ has been employed by marketers to describe a broad spectrum of business functions including document scanning, version control, document retrieval, document creation, electronic and paper archiving, document retention, and more. Despite the multitude of definitions, at the core of a robust document management system is an indexing system that is configured to easily capture metadata attributes...
When Document Locator v5.2 is made available, some new bells and whistles are included that existing and prospective customers have requested. I could certainly go into endless detail about the various product enhancements that have been added or mention the notably increased performance made against our internal benchmarks, but not today. Rather I felt like commenting on how PDFs –...
Most everyone knows what metadata is. And, we know that if we are organizing and categorizing electronic files, "metadata" can be our best-friend. Perhaps the simplest definition of metadata goes something like this: it is all the "data about the data". In other words, information that describes a file or its content. It can be basic things like 'when a file...
We've all seen it at one point or another. The "paper chase" is that routine paper-driven process that happens over and over again, but for some reason is still operating in an ancient pre-digital area. Accounting offers a good example, where some companies are ahead of the curve, and others are still passing paper. Here's a pretty generic scenario that applies...
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