Document management is a team activity. That means that you work with colleagues to create a document, gather feedback on it, and enhance its quality. But how does that work in practice? How do you get a document into the hands of your colleagues for their review and feedback?
Emailing attachments used to be how document management was done for a team. But that’s not good enough for today’s teams. You need a way to more efficiently collaborate with team members on your documents.
In this video, you’ll see KnowledgeTree in action, helping you to manage the creation of documents across your team.
If you are like most knowledge workers, you probably spend a large part of your week within an office productivity tool. Microsoft Office is often the first thing opened in the morning as you start to work with documents like invoices, contracts, budgets, and presentations.
KnowledgeTree has plug-ins designed specifically for Microsoft Office. They appear in your Office ribbon as a new tab, and give you the power to execute many of your key document management tasks.
As part of the document management blog series that we are running, let’s take a look at how you can use KnowledgeTree’s plug-ins into Microsoft Office to boost productivity.
Access a Document from Your Vault
Let’s say that you are working on a new sales proposal. A colleague has already created the document and added it to the KnowledgeTree vault. Now it is accessible to authorized users via the browser from anywhere. You want to improve the financial section of the proposal, so you need to open the document.
From within Microsoft Word, you click on the KnowledgeTree tab, and select ‘Open’. The tool will look into your vault and bring back the folders that you have access to. You can select the correct folder, and then open the document. You now have the latest version of the document open in Word, and you can start your edits.
Documents support your major business processes. So, it is important that you control the entire document management lifecycle. That is, the creation, organization, and ongoing management of these documents.
Let’s start by looking at how to create documents as a team.
Using Document Management to Add Documents
Teams need to work together on documents. But when they’re stored on your desktop, your colleagues can’t comment, reuse, or improve the quality of your document. And when a document is posted to a shared drive or a file sharing tool, it’s tough to find the latest version and impossible to collaborate.
Your business has many divisions, geographies, and departments. So, one way to structure your thousands of documents is through folder hierarchies. This is an intuitive approach to document management that’s well understood by knowledge workers. So, that means they are fast to put in place and adopt.
And when combined with Smart Tags for describing documents in a more sophisticated ‘grid’, they fully support the document management and their organization. Of course KnowledgeTree has terrific support for folders. Let’s take a quick look at how they can be used to support your document management efforts.
Adding Documents to the Correct Folder
When you are working with teams, especially external teams, it is handy to let people add documents in the most “low friction” way possible. One way to support that is by email. Each folder in KnowledgeTree has a unique, secure email address. Teams can share the address and email attachments to it. KnowledgeTree uploads them into the correct folder, and populates useful metadata from the email.
Invoices, budgets, proposals, and contracts. They are a key part of how you do business. So, you must make sure that these documents are reviewed and approved by the right people in your organization.
But if you’re emailing documents to colleagues and asking for their approval then there’s no simple way to track whether approvals happened. And you have no way to follow-up on stalled processes where documents are stuck at a certain stage.
Plus, if you deal with large volumes of document approvals it becomes even more challenging to stay in control. You simply have to automate the management of your document review and approval processes.
When looking for a document management tool, you want one that lets you browse through your documents and folders fast. Let’s take a quick look at the browse view in KnowledgeTree, and how it puts tools at your fingertips, and helps you find the documents you need.
The video takes a look at browsing for documents by folder hierarchies. Teams generally organize their online document vaults based on geography, business unit, or department. With hierarchies structured to support fast intuitive browsing and fast retrieval.
You’ll also want to ensure that your document management system has tools within easy reach. So, the ability to move, share, and subscribe to folders are easily accessible. Plus, management tools like tracking audit trails for individual folders should also be quick to find.
Last week KnowledgeTree announced several new features that help teams organize documents instantly. With ‘Upload via Email’ a user can send documents as attachments to an email, and the documents will be added to the selected folder.
Another key document management feature that was added was Optical Character Recognition, or OCR. This function allows text within images and scanned documents, like a contract, to be searchable. That makes document management a snap, even for documents that are invisible to other solutions.
With thousands or tens of thousands of documents, it can become impossible to organize and find the documents you need. That becomes especially critical when these are business critical documents like contracts, invoices, HR materials, sales proposals, and more.
So, how do you organize your documents efficiently to find what you need fast?
Document Management via OCR
It is especially problematic to organize these documents when you are dealing with scanned documents or images. This often happens in the legal and finance space where scanned contracts and invoices are often imported.
A new release from KnowledgeTree addresses this challenge. It includes Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, technology. This feature, for Enterprise-plan customers, scans documents and images as they are loaded into KnowledgeTree. Text embedded within these images is indexed, making it searchable. That means that contracts and invoices are well organized and can be quickly found by team members.
Document Management via Email
Another challenge the companies face is how to deal with the steady stream of new documents arriving from external parties or colleagues. For instance, there may be an external counsel that is sending supporting contracts. How do you get the content into your vault and into the right spot without extra steps?
Finance and accounting teams deal with a massive volume of documents each day. They could be invoices that need to be approved; budgets that must be archived; or proposals that need to be reviewed. Regardless, these documents must be effectively managed. That’s where document management comes in.
We’ve put together an eBook that compiles infographics, white papers, and more that describe how finance teams can effectively manage their key documents. You can download the free eBook here. Let’s take a look at some of the key sections of the paper.
Create and Manage Documents with Your Team
Developing a proposal or budget is a collaborative activity. That means that finance, accounting, the controller’s office, and the CFO may be involved in the creation of these documents. How do you manage the numerous versions, revisions, comments, and more?
Document management is about the effective creation, organization, and discovery of business documents. In this series of blog posts and videos, I’ll take a look at different functions within KnowledgeTree and how they can help you manage documents and boost productivity for related business processes.
Let’s start at the beginning of document management: adding documents to your online vault. KnowledgeTree gives you many ways to add documents. In this initial video, we’ll take a look at two basic ways: dragging and dropping documents into your browser and standard uploading.
What makes this especially interesting, though, is how you can use these tools to organize your documents. When you’re dealing with thousands or tens of thousands of documents, it is imperative that you and your team can quickly find the documents they need. Our tools for adding documents are tightly connected with KnowledgeTree tools for organizing documents.
Let’s see how that plays out when using our standard processes for adding documents. In this scenario, we have a corporate counsel team within a major manufacturer. The two document upload tools we’ll see in this demonstration are “drag and drop” using an HTML5 compliant browser, and our standard upload tool.
