Document Storage Software
Ever since man started communicating by the written word, there has been an exponential increase in the number of papers, documents, notes and records. With the invention of computers and their introduction into everyday business practices, these documents have increased even more. At least we are not relying on trees as much anymore (although some would argue that it is actually worse now), we are still faced with the same old challenge of storing and organising our documents. For paper based documents this has just been a matter of having an alphabetised filing cabinet, however storing your electronic documents can be a bit more challenging, as you will need to trawl through many document storage software packages to find the one that suits your needs.
The benefits of having your documents stored electronically are fairly obvious. First of all, you are going to be able to categorise them a lot easier. With a paper based filing system you are limited to putting your documents in one place, and using one sorting format. For example, you may decide to store the majority of your business related documents alphabetically by customer name, but when you need to run reports on a particular suburb, you have hours of work sifting through hundreds of folders to find the information you need. This is where electronic document storage software really shines. A decent software package will give you the ability of tagging each document with multiple keywords that can be used later for document retrieval. Once you have a system like this in place, running that report by suburb becomes as easy as cliking a button and quicker than walking over to the filing cabinet.
It is this ease of use and tremendous time saving that has caused many businesses to incorporate document storage and retrieval software into their core business model. In fact, although many businesses still need to use paper based documents to a large extent, you will find that many of them scan their documents into the computer and utilise OCR (opitcal character recognition) software to tag and store them as they are being scanned in. This is a tedious and time consuming job, but the long term benefits make it worthwhile for many different kinds of businesses.
One of the first decisions you are going to have to make is the medium that your documents will be stored on. The size of your business and the amount of documentation you use within your business will be a large deciding factor when it comes to media storage. Although it is considered a fairly old medium, many businesses still use microfilm to store their important documents. The biggest benefit of microfilm is that it will not be destroyed by electrical disturbances or surges, The document is transferred onto the microfilm in tiny images that can still be blown up full size. Storing a large amount of documents on microfilm makes it difficult to organise and categorise thoug, and takes up a lot of space.
For the vast majority of businesses, an external hard drive is the perfect choice, and coupled with good document storage management software, can turn your business into a very smooth running machine indeed. Any electronic storage media should be backed up multiple times. You should have at least two copies of your documents stored electronically, preferably at different geographical locations, and the media that they are stored on should be housed in a safe environment away from potential electrical and magnetic disturbances.
The main three goals of any good document storage software should be storage, search and retrieval. For your business to run smoothly, you need instant access to all the information at any given time. Ideally, you should be able to search a document not only based on the categories, tags and filenames that you give it, but on the text of the document itself. Versioning is another important aspect of document storage, and is something that most decent software packages will allow for. This means that over the life cycle of the document, a new copy is stored and date stamped. For complex documents such as project planning, this is an extremely important aspect. It means that at any given time you can look back into the history of the document and view the changes that have been made.
