There are a lot of opinions on SharePoint these days, but one thing is clear: Microsoft CMS may have changed the game for document management forever. While many companies have gone partially paperless in their internal operations, SharePoint’s content management systems are making it possible for the paperless office to finally become a reality. Paper transactions are a common part of everyday office life, but thanks to SharePoint’s unique features, there is now the real possibility of making paper document management a thing of the past.
Identifying the “Paper” Trail – And Making It Go Away
One of the most powerful aspects of SharePoint is the ability to organize scanned documents, rendering their paper versions as originals for readable, usable digital copies. There are paper trails anywhere in an office, whether invoices, payments, vendor commitments, etcetera. By using OCR in conjunction with SharePoint, incoming paper can be converted to digital form easily and quickly, improving response tracking and more. Once you add in the additional collaborative Yammer functionality to document management, document review, even by multiple departments, becomes relatively quick and easy.
That said, it’s important to remember that incoming paper needs to be organized. And this is where SharePoint’s organizing features come in.
Organizing Your Paper into Useable Content
SharePoint uses a hierarchical system to organize documents, meaning that you’ll be able to assign functions for documents to different organizational sections, much like people do with paper documents now. One of the biggest sources of “document clog” is misunderstanding of the fundamental nature of digital document management.
Instead of seeing document management the same way it’s seen with a paper document, it’s often seen as a “funnel” to be distributed later, increasing user frustration overall. SharePoint attempts to avoid this with the inclusion of site collections, sites and libraries, which can then be assigned individually. Many users who give up on electronic document management miss out on this simple principle – one which is actually designed to make the user experience easier – and start bunching up their electronic document management.
If this sounds familiar to you, it’s a good idea to take advantage of the services of specialists in Microsoft CMS to assist in the transition from paper to digital document storage. By making sure that your digital documents are organized correctly at the outset, a move to full digital internally will be relatively painless.