Proven Ways to Use SharePoint for Enterprise Document Management

Enterprises operates with many businesses that produces a lot of electronic documents as a result there is a quite a lot of chances of losing documents. An apt solution for enterprises that want to automate, streamline and optimize document driven processes should use a fully-fledged document management system and it helps the employees to be more productive

Below are the special features of electronic document management for enterprises and procedure to use SharePoint

Capturing and validating

There are various unstructured data formats operated by Enterprises that are not searchable by their content such as TIFF, JPG or CAD documents. Enterprises should make all documents readable and suitable for full-text search this is the effective way of handling documents. Integration of documents management systems with optical character recognition (OCR) software helps in making the document more effective. Additionally, visual validation feature helps in automatically finding the mistakes in scanned documents

If a user wants to convert a paper document into searchable digital documents such as PDF documents that can be indexed, classified and saved in SharePoint libraries can integrate with OCR.

SharePoint Automatic Indexing

Indexing is very important in enterprises as they deal with lot of documents related work. Document management system will make your life easier in categorize, archive, find and retrieve the required data. SharePoint provides automatic indexing which helps in document retrieval easy and fast. To avoid duplicates, SharePoint document management system gives an exclusive ID to each document. Additionally, SharePoint helps in creating metadata fields for each document, which can be simplified/classified the storage and search, also SharePoint gives the option of including additional metadata fields

SharePoint Storage Space

Any Organization requires large amount of storage space for digital documents. A collection of documents in SharePoint Online is a list and each list have a list items. We can save up to 30 million items in SharePoint Online. Additionally, a library can have up to 30 million files and folders. We can have file size up to 15GB. This SharePoint features can fulfill the requirements of any organization. You can also purchase additional storage space. SharePoint support file types like (docx, .pdf, .pptx, .zip, .odt, .ods, .xslb, .ppsx and 3D models).

Version Management

Versioning feature is very useful in organization document management system because it will consume more time and effort to restore a document which are accidentally saved. SharePoint has a special feature called “Version Management”. This feature helps in storing the documents when the user edits any time. SharePoint retains 50,000 major and 511 minor versions for each document.

SharePoint Search features

One of major challenge in an organization is searching a document. Departments like HR, Accounts and Production will have their own document management systems and at times they need to carry out search through all the departments at the same time, also they might perform multilingual search.

SharePoint document management system gives an effective search based on file names, content and metadata. It also has federated search, where one search query triggers similarly search through many resources and finally delivered in a single integrated list. The features are limited in multilingual search and the search results depends on users’ permissions.

Allocation and Retrieval

Accessing document 24/7 anywhere and on any devices is very important for any business to keep their customers updated. When distribution is considered, the documents should be forwarded in a protected format like PDF and SharePoint generates automated PDF files. SharePoint document management system can be used in any devices and without connecting to the internet. The changes which are made offline gets updated when the system is connected to the internet. A document in a SharePoint can be accessed via URL that doesn’t have location-specific information.

Document SharePoint Workflows

Allocation of work is automated in Document workflows, this makes the business operations more effective. SharePoint allows the users to built-in their own workflows by setting a rule of the assignee’s so, the work is allocated as per the rules. Additionally, SharePoint has many standard built-in workflows.

Real-time Collaboration

One of the times saving features in document management is Real-time collaboration or co-authoring. This allows the users to edit the same document simultaneously and the changes are shown through colored bars, this will increase the productivity of document processing. A document which involves different section employees’ input can access and edit their part simultaneously. The changes made by the co-author is notified and SharePoint gives the details of the changes and the time of changes made.

SharePoint Security and Compliance System

Security and Compliance system plays an important role in any organization, because it purely depends on encouraging customers trust and loyalty of the organization. SharePoint provides an answer for any type of security and compliance in an organization. You can control the whole system by setting up a rule who can view, edit and delete documents and also establishes a system of different permission levels for users.

SharePoint Integration feature

Integration is a good feature for organizations, as they have multiple sophisticated data-driven business processes without universal document management software. They also can cut the costs and use full functionality of document management like ERP, CRM, BI etc. In SharePoint we can integrate with project management, HR Systems, BI, accounts etc. It displays a good compatibility with most of the Microsoft`s products.

Office 365 and SharePoint Cost Management

SharePoint is not costly, as the license for Office 365 E3 which includes SharePoint Online is just $20.00 user/month. If you plan to buy only SharePoint Online it costs $10.00 user/month.

Reference:

VEELEAD. (2019). Proven Ways to Use SharePoint for Enterprise Document Management. Available at: http://veelead.com/blog/how-to-use-sharepoint-for-enterprise-document-management-on-a-large-scale/ [Accessed: 19th April 2019].

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