What You Should Expect from Your Document Management System – Part Two

This is a sequel to last week’s post where we listed a workflow as one of the mandatory expectations from a Document Management System (DMS). In this post, we’ll look at some more.

Ease of use: A DMS is used by almost everyone within the organization on a daily basis – from the HR to the developer to the marketer. It is not limited to a single business process but works as an add-on for every process. It is unreasonable to expect that everyone from every function would be able to use a system that’s not intuitive. Not everyone is proficient with computers and not everyone would have used an online application before. It is therefore essential that the DMS is intuitive and easy–to-use. The system should just be an extension of their physical workstation where they can perform their tasks.

Retention & automation: One of the biggest advantages of a document management system is automation and one good practice is to get rid of obsolete documents, either by deleting them or by archiving them. A DMS gives you the chance to define retention and disposition schedules which can be used to automate the document life cycle. This means that you don’t have to bother with manually deleting old documents anymore.

Version control & audit trail: This is perhaps the most important feature and the most basic expectation. The version control feature allows you to maintain different versions of the same document and creates a new one every time an action has been performed so that you always have the previous version safe in case the new version has been compromised and you need to return to the old one. Apart from this, the system tracks and logs all actions performed on a document. If anyone wants to find the trail, all they have to do is to pull an audit trail report which tells them the path the document’s taken.

Have any more expectations? Let us know!