SharePoint Document Management System is a very powerful way to manage your business documents. Electronic or printed documents are a critical part of almost any organisation. It can be challenging to manage business knowledge, which often comes from multiple sources. Depending on the nature of your business, a document management system (DMS) that collects, stores, and retrieves both paper and digital documents, records, and other content can provide your business with several important benefits.
Enterprise document management is often one of the activities that companies want to streamline and automate because it is a time-consuming area, prone to human error, and has a fundamental impact on the overall efficiency of the organisation. As a result, investments in document management software are increasing year after year.
The purpose of Microsoft’s SharePoint Online platform is to help employees seamlessly share and manage content and knowledge. SharePoint Online document management is a cloud-based service and capability that can be used anytime from anywhere and offers the latest and fine-grained cloud security mechanisms to keep your company’s confidential information safe, organised, and compliant.
What is SharePoint document management system
Document management system (DMS) is software that tracks and supports the entire life cycle of a document. The processes that make up a document’s lifecycle begin with its generation and finally end with its disposition and destruction. A DMS, encompassing every evolving aspect of the document and each specific change, revision, and usage, can be used to generate document renditions and store and track them through each version.
Having a good management system is crucial. Making the right choice is equally crucial. SharePoint is one of the most robust and feature-rich and economical solutions of any document management platform on the market.
Concurrent use and multi-user operations make SharePoint a collaborative platform that enables businesses to store and manage simple to complex data management solutions. In 2001, Microsoft SharePoint was released. Since its inception, Microsoft has produced iterations of SharePoint to meet the ever-increasing demand for client features. By automating the SharePoint document lifecycle, DMS improves employee performance by 20% and reduces operational costs by 55% when search capabilities are taken into account.
Benefits of using SharePoint online for document management
Enhanced data security
Critical documents can be kept safe by restricting user access with a document management system. Microsoft’s SharePoint online document management solution also provides an additional level of security by enabling the owner to control user access through compliance controls, including audits and reports.
The risk of data loss can be reduced with sophisticated policies, combined with legal holds, records management, retention policies, and trash policies. The compliance and security center also ensures proper control at every level.
Document Sharing
How do you get the opinion of your colleagues about a document? Do you generate a document and distribute it to your colleagues for review and feedback? Do all users send individual files back to you after they’ve been edited? In that case, you manually compile all revisions and comments into one file. This is just too much trouble. Managing document comments, revisions and changes is significantly more intelligent with SharePoint and MS Office combined.
Multiple people can read and edit the file using permissions, workflow, and approvals, all in real time. Each person’s feedback is on file, with versions kept and available for comparison within the MS Office client. The document automatically consolidates the comments, comments, changes and the overall process.
Version control
Have files on your file sharing system been given names similar to “Proposal v3 – final-version – revision-2 – final”? Ever started editing a document only to find out it wasn’t the most recent revision? SharePoint version tools allow you to track version history in a centrally accessible location with a single file.
Each time the document is saved, a new version is automatically added to the list, with a full audit trail and rollback capability. You can always go back to an earlier version if you want. Users can comment on changes made to their version. Users can even track major and minor versions (which they can publish).
Metadata
In SharePoint online, metadata is additional information that you might track about documents. Think of it as similar to the folders in your file share, but with the added ability to generate various metadata fields with a rich array of data types.
For example, your file share might contain a folder structure by department, followed by a hierarchy by project. However, some projects are managed by multiple departments. How can you collect all documents for these cross-departmental projects in one location?
You can add a column for each department and a separate column for each project in SharePoint. You can then use one (or both) of these columns to filter and sort the data. If you want to find files that are being worked on by three departments for Project ABC, you can simply filter by “Project ABC”. It takes some time to adjust to this new method of file organisation.
Regulatory Compliance
Critical industries such as healthcare, law and finance must adhere closely to regulatory standards and requirements. Everything is made simpler with a document management system, including audit reports and security settings that follow precise compliance standards at every stage.
Effective team collaboration
Versioning is a critical part of SharePoint that tracks every change made to the content, along with the date, time, and user who made it. In addition, multiple simultaneous people can edit to avoid a daisy chain of people waiting to do their updates. Teams collaborate more when they can share and change files in real time.
Thanks to SharePoint, multiple users can easily collaborate on the same page at the same time. It is possible for a sales representative, engineer and marketing coordinator to work on the same proposal at the same time. When users work on a section, SharePoint smartly locks that section and changes the document when changes are made.
Workflow and anytime, anywhere access
Office 365 SharePoint workflows, such as Microsoft Flow, are miniature programs with a no-code/low-code footprint that accelerate business activities. Workflows can include getting document approvals, collecting comments, or notifying the team each time a person finishes adding their input to a document or integrating with external systems. The desktops (PC or Mac), the web, and mobile devices all support SharePoint. You can access your work documents from anywhere at any time.
Conclusion SharePoint Document Management System
The SharePoint document management solution is effective and beneficial for businesses of all sizes. Any business, large or small, with the right implementation, can increase team efficiency and collaboration while managing documents. Microsoft SharePoint Document Management System is definitely worth the cost, in addition to its many other benefits.
Tech-Wales SharePoint Consultancy & Training
At Tech-Wales we are experts in setting up SharePoint tailor made for your business. We offer excellent SharePoint Consultancy and Training for your organisation and help manage your valuable documents and saving you time and money. Contact us today to discuss he possibilities for your business.