SHAREPOINT FOR DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT
Flexible functionality to address varying document storage and retrival requirements.
Traditional Document Management Systems (DMS) are often expensive electronic filing systems that add little value to the business process and can become as unworkable as the paper based systems that preceded them. SharePoint provides flexibility to meet different requirements in different ways.
Procedures Document Libraries
One of the challenges in Wealth Management is maintaining a process for ensuring that staff can readily access detailed documentation about procedures for the various activities that the service provider undertakes. If the information is hard to access, out of date and poorly organised then staff will be less likely to refer to the formal procedures and instead the result can be a dilution of control, poor compliance, high error rate and increased costs as managers send work back to administrators to be done again, ultimately resulting in poor customer service.
Using SharePoint to manage procedures document libraries means that the documents can be readily locatable, most likely from the front page of your Information Portal. Using SharePoint’s version control and document approval facilities and optionally workflow, managers can keep on top of the job of making sure that only the current and approved version of the document is viewable by staff in general and also it will provide facilities for knowing when a document needs to be reviewed as well as providing a facility for approval of new versions of documents before they are published.
Fusion helped one site organise and manage over 1,300 procedure and policy documents that were formerly scattered across various network file shares with Excel Spreadsheets providing directories to the documents. Naturally this approach was inflexible, cumbersome and difficult for staff to find documents with.
General Document Management
SharePoint can be used as a conventional DMS for scanning storing gerneral correspondance, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, in fact just about any file type. Meta data – or information tags can be associated with each the document – to aid document retrival from document library through SharePoint’s serach facilities. Metadata fields can be mandatory to ensure that a document gets correctly and completely categorised.
Depending on a clients requirements clients can opt for a single large document repository, or opt for mutiple specific purpose document libriries.
Flyingboat Interaction with Document Libraries
Documents stored in SharePoint document libraries are locatable through a unique URL (web link) and with integration with Flyingboat we are able to link to documents stored in SharePoint. Flyingboat can potentially insert new documents into document libraries, update document metadata and perform tasks with documents, makingfor a powerful integration.
Talk to us about your specific document managment issues and we can assess whether SharePoint can be part of your solution.
