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Moving an organization to be fully digital is no simple task, and it requires the right tools and a paperless office strategy to ensure success.
The transition to a paperless office is more than just capturing paper-based documents into a digital format and storing them in a network. The move requires workflows that take advantage of digital content that can move around in the software application from individual to individual — mimicking traditional paper-based processes.
Transitioning an organization to be paperless is a two-pronged effort: digitizing in-house records and documents, and employing a platform to handle incoming digital content.
For the former, an organization can turn to a scanning tool that can assist in digitizing documents and indexing the information to be searchable and accessible to users across their devices. Looking ahead, organizations can stop the flow of paper documents into their offices by redirecting users or customers to a digital platform, such as an ERP or web portal, to capture the information that previously was written, printed and submitted on paper.
While separate tools exist that cover the individual tasks of going paperless — document scanning and management, user access controls and more — more commonly, organizations may choose to invest in an enterprise content management (ECM) platform that has those tools and more.
There are several ECM platforms that organizations can use to help implement a paperless office strategy. These platforms can be integrated into existing on-premises environments or hosted via the cloud. Some of the platforms available include the following:
Going paperless is more than just scanning documents or changing the way users interact with different documents. The move to a digital world means users will rely on a computer screen or mobile device to interact with content. To ensure the initiative’s success, the company must evaluate all the changes that implementing a paperless office strategy entails, which can include the following:
Beyond evaluating how a paperless office will change day-to-day operations, an organization must also consider how the change will affect employees and methods for ensuring user buy-in.
When a business decides to move toward a paperless office, one of the key areas that will contribute to its success is the users themselves. Ensuring that the staff is on board with the change in their workflows and processes will help drive the implementation of a paperless office.
Getting user buy-in requires demonstrating the benefits and how productivity and efficiency will improve for the business and employees. Organizations should be encouraged to hold open forums where employees can voice their questions and opinions. An open forum can help instill the idea that a change of this scale is a collaborative effort.
With employee buy-in, management can better understand the current practices and how they will change with a paperless office strategy.
Eliminating paper within an office may not be a huge cost saver after considering some of the high costs associated with the software and hardware necessary.
A paperless office requires physical hardware such as scanners, digital storage, servers to run the software back end and software applications to manage the scanned or digitally created documents. The cost varies depending on the company’s size and its vertical. For example, electronic medical records systems for healthcare can be very expensive, while manufacturing organizations may be able to opt for a generic document scanning software to capture and index scanned forms.
Outside of the technology, there is also the human capital cost associated with the time needed to scan legacy documents into the new digital system.
Despite the cost of investment, a paperless office strategy can still be a net gain. Organizations should expect several efficiency gains from being able to search and analyze data in a digital format, which may make the cost more bearable.
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As organizations embrace digital workspaces, they increasingly rely on video to communicate and share information.
Many enterprise video applications can support business areas like product marketing, corporate training, employee onboarding and team collaboration. Content teams must manage videos like business documents and images. An enterprise video content management system (CMS) can enable digital experiences with targeted business purposes and help organizations manage videos effectively and efficiently to address a wide range of business challenges.
With the advent of the cloud and affordable recording devices — including smartphones and tablets — employees can easily create and distribute videos, transforming how people work.
Video content management incorporates various technologies, platforms and services that store and distribute videos within an organization. As management capabilities improve, video content management can help develop next-generation enterprise apps.
From one perspective, video is simply another content type within an enterprise app. Yet, enterprise video CMSes offer benefits to manage enterprise content and digital assets.
Enterprise security. Organizations need video CMSes with enterprise-scale security mechanisms to ensure only people and processes with appropriate permissions can view and modify particular videos.
A single source of truth. An organization must distinguish between works in progress and a video’s final version. Organizations must use more than a network file-sharing system and establish a single source of truth, which video CMSes offer.
Corporate governance. Organizations face challenges regarding corporate governance. Many video CMS vendors offer policies, procedures and automated processes to mitigate risks and comply with regulatory mandates while enhancing productivity and meeting business needs.
Additionally, enterprise video content management must address three main challenges.
Storage. Organizations may struggle more to store and distribute videos than documents and photos, as videos have larger file sizes stored in various file formats. Additionally, video reaches many different endpoints, including web browsers, mobile devices and kiosks, each with distinct viewers and display resolutions. Content managers may require special technologies to optimize distribution across digital networks for successful playback.
Content lifecycle. Videos have widely varied content lifecycles — beginning with creation and source, then including storage, accessibility, distribution, long-term retention and removal at its end of life.
Video creation is a critical and challenging part of the content lifecycle. Depending on the video’s business purpose, creation can have various moving parts and an entire production team or require a few people and a more streamlined approach. Both approaches can create new obstacles or problems to solve.
Findability. Content managers often struggle to organize, find and discover videos, which can be more difficult to catalog than other content types. To alleviate these challenges, content teams can catalog videos with metadata — titles, dates, summaries and other keywords. Video management should use information architecture categories and extend them based on the architectural design principles.
In addition, videos capture motion and sounds, which may require speech-to-text analysis. Organizations need smart tools based on AI technologies that can automatically understand a video’s context, detect different activities, recognize images, identify products, analyze sentiments and sense scene changes.
Many vendors offer video content management capabilities, ranging from predefined systems to extensible video platforms with value-added services. The comparison chart highlights five different vendors in the market, each with a particular strength.
Brightcove’s Enterprise Video Suite. Brightcove offers a secure platform that includes immersive video experiences and flexible delivery for corporate marketing.
Grain 2.0. Grain Intelligence Inc.’s system analyzes Zoom meetings and converts livestream Zoom recordings into short clips to highlight action items and enhance team collaboration.
IBM Enterprise Video Streaming. IBM’s system offers video streaming services at scale and optimizes delivery across multiple network configurations, geographies and customer endpoints.
Microsoft Stream. Microsoft offers a video portal called Stream. The vendor has announced plans to integrate Stream into the Microsoft 365 suite, adding AI and other platform services to enhance security and video delivery.
Panopto. This vendor offers a comprehensive platform for secure video engagement with specialized capabilities that support specific business activities, such as e-learning, online training and customer communications.
The enterprise video content management market is dynamic, composed of industry stalwarts, startups and new entrants that offer unique capabilities while existing vendors continue to enhance features and introduce innovative services.
Part of: Video content management wrangles video in the workplace
Video has become a key part of business workflows. Four foundational enterprise video platform capabilities can help organizations manage the growth of user-generated video.
Video conferencing is now a fundamental part of employees’ workdays. But managing and storing video content brings some new challenges that must be addressed.
Yes, it is legal to record virtual meetings. But, for ethical or legal reasons, remote workers shouldn’t record them all. Learn when recording is and isn’t appropriate.
The rise in remote work caused an increase in video conference recordings from many virtual meetings. As a result, organizations must know how to store recordings securely.
Video is everywhere. Organizations that want to reap its benefits need a strategy that supports video creation and provides a central location for security, management and storage.
With more video content than ever, many organizations have adopted video content management systems. This comparison chart highlights five different vendors and what they offer.
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Keeping your business’s documents organized and securely stored can be difficult and overwhelming, with seemingly endless options for digital document storage and organization. Document repositories, which function as part of document management systems, provide an easy, secure way to store all your documents in one centralized location. Read on to learn what a document repository is, how it is used and how you can set one up for your own business.
A document repository is a shared storage space that can be accessed by all approved team members. It is managed by users who have been granted admin rights and controls. Creating an organized document repository is a key part of having a document management system (DMS) that serves your business well. As such, document repositories are typically organized with the needs of users in mind, allowing them to search documents by title or keyword, group documents by team, or use a folder system to efficiently store documents.
A centralized document repository is an efficient way to save space and protect your important files in single digital space, which can:
Editor’s note: Need a document management system for your business? Fill out the below questionnaire to have our vendor partners contact you with free information.
Document repositories are used in a variety of ways, but they are most commonly used to ensure access to and protection for all of your business’s documents and files. Most businesses use their repositories as a single place where all employees can access Word documents, emails, scanned files, PDF files, external data, CAD files, pictures and other graphics.
Document repositories can be synonymous with or used as part of a DMS, which is an automated way to store, manage, and track electronic documents, as well as manage workflows, output systems, and information retrieval systems. The repository is crucial, as it is where all the documents are stored, and as such, must be accessible and well organized for it to serve its purpose.
One of the main uses for document repositories is to reduce data redundancy and “overcrowding” of files on your desktop or local drives. A document repository gives you a single storage space that is shared among all of your resources and employees, making it so that documents are not duplicated across departments and hoard necessary space. Additionally, the use of a document repository makes all of your documents searchable through the use of indexing and tagging, which ensures that document retrieval is quick and efficient, no matter who is searching for the document.
Document repositories can also protect your documents against unwanted changes – whether from malicious intent or errors – through version control, which tracks all changes made to a document and notes who made them. Administrators can set permissions to control who has access to which documents, and who can make which types of changes. This feature helps preserve the integrity of your documents and ensures that all changes are made by appropriate parties only.
You can use your document repository system to share and distribute documents to your employees or team members. The system will allow you to send out documents in any manner you need, including email or file transfer protocol.
A document repository can provide several benefits to your business, from document protection to easier collaboration amongst team members, all built into the system.
Indexing makes it easy to retrieve and organize documents. This is a process in which all your files are categorized and registered via metadata in your filing system based on specific criteria that you can customize, such as file function or size.
Using a document repository helps protect your information and files by encrypting your data, among other safeguards, since a data breach or storage issue resulting in a loss of data or an unauthorized user gaining access to sensitive documents could be disastrous for your business. A document repository provides safeguards such as managed access control, an audit trail, automatic backups, and password protection. In the event of a disaster, like a fire or flood, your files are stored safely in the cloud, away from physical harm.
A major benefit of computerized storage over traditional storage is the ability to scale, or grow, the system alongside your business. To take advantage of this benefit, however, you need to choose software that allows you to add advanced features later on or upgrade to a higher plan so that you do not have to switch software.
A document repository makes it simple for users to share and collaborate on documents. Look for tools such as live editing, file sharing, document sharing, integrations with programs like Google Docs or Microsoft Teams, and access restriction.
If your business uses a CRM application or ERP database, look for a single repository or DMS that integrates with these programs. This will make your daily workflow much easier by allowing you to access, edit, back up, and monitor documents that are created within your CRM or ERP. Most electronic document management systems integrate with email programs such as Microsoft Outlook.
With the right indexing, finding a document in a repository takes mere seconds, and can also allow employees to remotely access the documents they need. The problem with storing paper documents is that searching for the right document – when you have an entire business’s worth to go through – can be difficult and time-consuming, and can even cost you money. Record Nations found that the cost to store documents for a business with 100 employees would be roughly $622,500 without the use of a file manager, and $48,000 with the use of a file manager.
If you are just starting out creating a document repository within a document management system, take the time to decide how exactly you want to organize and name your files. Developing a system for content management early on saves you a great deal of time – and headaches – later on, and will make it easy for anyone in your organization to find the files they need.
Follow these five steps to set up your system.
Start by gathering all the documents you want stored in the repository. These can be digital or paper files (though you will need to scan any physical documents). Organize them loosely – you don’t have to implement your entire system at this point.
If you have paper documents that you want to store, you can scan them using a scanner built into your printer, or you can download a mobile app such as AdobeScan, Dropbox or Genius Scan. A scanner will upload a digital file directly to your computer, while a mobile app will create a PDF or JPG file that is stored on your phone, or an online storage site, and can be exported to wherever you need it.
This step is where you determine the finer points of your filing system, and it’s important that you stick to what you decide. Proper and consistent naming makes it easy for anyone in your company to find documents. Consider the document’s function, content, creation date, how long it needs to be stored, and other key qualities when considering how to name it.
If you have both paper and electronic documents that each need to be kept in their original formats, try to integrate your two systems to work together as best you can. For example, scan all of your paper documents and store them in the repository so you have a backup in case something happens to your paper documents, and vice versa for an electronic document.
Once your system is all set up, make sure your entire company is informed and trained on how the system works, and how you expect files to be named and stored going forward. Consider holding training sessions or incorporating file storage training as part of your new employee onboarding process.
Yes, there are open-source document management systems for document repositories. An open-source document repository is a platform that can be shared as a public source and modified to meet a business’s needs.
Open-source software is typically budget-friendly, easily accessible for small businesses, and is a flexible option that will work for many different types of businesses. Some of the most popular open-source software providers are:
Here are some of our best picks for document management services, all of which provide document repositories.
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