Document management is a social activity. Each day you work with teams to create, discover, and manage business documents. And when you have a global team, or work with many departments, you need to collaborate efficiently.
What happens if you don’t? You end up with proposals without critical team member input. You duplicate effort by re-creating documents that already existed. And you have distributed documents that haven’t been approved by the right people.
In this series of blog posts we’ll see how KnowledgeTree helps teams work together for document management.
Sharing Documents with Colleagues
With any important business document, you need to gather team members’ input. But sending an email to 10 colleagues will get you 10 replies, with 10 attachments, and 10 sets of feedback embedded in the documents. You need a more efficient way to get comments from colleagues and improve the quality of your documents.
With KnowledgeTree, you can share documents with colleagues with a simple click. Your selected colleagues receive the latest version as an attachment. Or, you can send a link to the document in KnowledgeTree, which is accessible from a computer or mobile device, wherever your colleagues are connected to the internet.
KnowledgeTree even allows you to invite guest users to access your document. That means that partners like external legal counsel can access just the documents you want to share. You can control which third parties have this limited access, ensuring that you retain document management while promoting information sharing.
Staying on Top of Your Document Feedback
Once in KnowledgeTree authorized users can download the latest version of your document and review the document offline, or access the document via the Microsoft Office plugins, or walk through the content in a handy preview mode. Colleagues can then determine what changes they would recommend.
Team members can add their comments directly into the activity feed for the document. That allows the document’s creator and other contributors to see how others think the document should be enhanced.
With new comments arriving frequently, and the document itself being modified by colleagues, it’s important to stay on top of change. KnowledgeTree lets you subscribe to individual documents or folders. That means that when a document is changed or new comments are added, you’ll be instantly alerted. Document management requires that you know what is happening to your documents, and subscriptions help you do exactly that.
In the next blog post in this series, we’ll take a look at how to collaboratively edit documents and avoid version chaos when working across global teams.
