Indispensable...
... and documents are indispensable for any company. And although everyone is aware of their central importance, organizing them remains a real challenge for many.
- Scattered filing: Documents are stored scattered across local computers, clients, or file shares. In cases of illness or employee departure, it's unclear where they are located, and access is not regulated. The search effort is high, and working from home becomes impossible. Even a unified backup remains wishful thinking: if documents are lost or a hacker attack occurs, the data is irretrievably lost.
- Security issues: Often, permission management is lacking, and access controls are not stringent. Complex permission structures - who has access to what, read or edit permissions - are often not feasible with file-share solutions; in the worst case, unauthorized access can occur.
- Lack of workflows: Companies would like continuous workflows and would like to integrate document management into their business processes. However, solutions like file-share are hardly integrable into other programs such as an ERP, and improvisational solutions cannot lead to automation.
Document Management System (DMS): Yes, please!
A tool for filing organization is needed!
A document management system (DMS) or an enterprise content management (ECM) system: ITISeasy.docs. It captures documents, whether digital or physical, as electronic files and stores them centrally. However, this alone is not enough. To be usable, the data must be searchable and findable.
Therefore, a DMS needs:
- Good indexing: Documents are tagged with metadata such as author or creation date and enriched.
- Sophisticated search function: A good DMS can save up to 30 minutes of search time per user per day.
- Version control: Changes are always saved as the current document version, and its history can track who changed what and when.
- Information availability: When a document is changed, the current version is available to all users - everyone works with the same information.
Integrating it into the Office server, as with our ITISeasy.docs tool, is intelligent. This opens the Word or Excel interface to edit a document. Other nice-to-haves include an integrated wiki for easy knowledge transfer within the company and analysis and reporting functions to measure efficiency.
With DMS for integrated Business Process Management
It becomes perfect when a Business Process Management (BPM) tool can be integrated into the DMS - for seamless information exchange and optimal structuring of processes and filing.
For example, workflows can be assigned: uploading an invoice automatically triggers an invoice review. Even complex approval processes can be mapped. This makes it possible to share documents digitally across multiple instances - with internal departments, customers, or accountants. A continuous process chain is created.
Especially the integration of DMS into ERP is central. This process automation massively improves efficiency in document management.
Document Management:
Why Open-Source?
An open-source solution for document management is sensible for the following reasons:
- Flexibility: Companies can customize the software to their requirements, easily extend it, and integrate it into existing systems via interfaces, as open-source solutions are interoperable.
- Independence: With an open-source solution, companies are not dependent on a provider or a proprietary solution. They save license costs.
- Up-to-dateness: New features are usually quickly available due to the collaborative development of the open-source community. This community can even reduce internal IT efforts since its expertise can be tapped into.
DMS: Easily Ensuring Security and Compliance
A DMS is central to data security, provided it has a comprehensive role and rights concept. ITISeasy.docs has a workflow engine for simple approval processes: permissions can easily be taken from the existing rights management. In addition, documents are encrypted directly when stored on the server: This makes it possible, for example, to store salary statements or personnel files without everyone being able to read them.
If the DMS is an open-source solution, security can be further increased through community self-control: Regular security checks are carried out by swarm intelligence. Security vulnerabilities are responded to promptly. Transparency also comes into play: Companies can review the source code, find out where their data is located, and what happens to it. Availability of data is also guaranteed across multiple locations and in case of failure through the mirroring common in open-source solutions. Companies benefit from this increased security without significant setup efforts or high investment costs. Another security factor is traceability: Audit trails in ITISeasy.docs, for example, allow tracking the change history of a document. This way, immutability can be proven to authorities.
ITISeasy.docs is operated as a cloud-based DMS on German servers to ensure GDPR compliance. Through its intelligent archiving, it complies with the prescribed retention periods. Compliance, regulations in finance and law, and adaptation to local business requirements and integration capabilities with software solutions are given due to its optimization for the German market.
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A Future-Proof DMS is Cloud-Based
A future-proof DMS like ITISeasy.docs supports cloud integration and mobile applications, enabling access regardless of the device. With such a structure, it can quickly respond to changing requirements and technology trends such as artificial intelligence. ITISeasy.docs is also scalable, making it performant and capable of growing with the company. An open-source solution has proven to be particularly sustainable here.