The Real Way to Use Your New Document Management Software

8 November 2021
 Categories: Technology, Blog

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You've gotten document management software loaded onto your computers at work, you've read the how-to documents and gone through tutorials. Are you ready to put that software to work? Of course not. There's more to using a document management system than just opening the programme and scanning something in. When you introduce a new system to your workplace – or even just a new piece of software to upgrade the system you've been using – you not only have to customise it to fit your office's particular needs, but you also need to ensure the software will not create problems that aren't currently there.

Who Is Authorised to Change Which Files?

First, who is authorised to change a file, be it to add information, delete items, scan in documents and so on? This is a highly variable issue, and your office's needs may be vastly different from the needs of another company using the same software. You do need to make sure that bored co-workers can't change other people's files just to annoy them, angry former employees can't delete files out of revenge and employees can't snoop in other people's files. Even if your team seems like the best in the world, you need these checks on modification power to ensure there aren't grounds for suspicion later on. It could be that everyone will have scanning privileges, but only supervisors will have delete privileges, for example.

Backups and Backups of Backups

When will you make backups of the documents managed by the software, and where will you store them? Even if you got the software to act as a cloud backup for paper documents, you'll need to back up the electronic files to be sure that, should the system have a glitch, you won't have to redo a lot of scanning work and data entry. You also want to have a backup somewhere away from the main office if possible (although if you've got only one location, that can be difficult) in case something happens to the main building, such as a natural disaster.

Proofread OCR Scans

OCR has come a long, long way since the days of scanning only half-legible sentences and making letters run together (e.g., "rn" becoming "m"). Still, you have to be careful about the visual quality of what you scan in, and if necessary, you'll need to proofread what you scan. If you're working with documentation that contains precise information, such as specs, you'll have to have anyone scanning in documents proofread the resulting electronic version to ensure errors don't proliferate throughout the system.

Document management software is very helpful, but if you don't put regulations in place about who can do what, and if you don't back up the data you enter and don't check for errors, the software could become difficult to use. That's not the software's fault, so start figuring out the answers to these issues now.

Contact a company like Link Technologies Tasmania to learn more about document management software.