I believe that one of the most beneficial (and amazingly handy) advantages of using a document management solution is the collaboration workflow. It allows for more than one person to access and work on a document in a workflow without any worry that you will lose the most current version. Why does this help you?

A common bottleneck in most businesses begins at the file cabinet. Sure, in theory, the concept of a physical file cabinet should be efficient—that is IF people use extreme care when putting files in or taking files out. Yet, for one reason or another, employees make mistakes, get lazy, or maybe just don’t care as much as they should. Unfortunately for your business, if someone loses or misplaces a file then it could be missing for a long time.

Back to the electronic collaboration environment….

In that same scenario, using a workflow manager like docAssist, employees can work in electronic files in a very systematic way—eliminating the risk of the careless or just tired employee. Automated workflow allows for collaboration on projects because of the check in and checkout function for documents.

Think about this.. not many processes in a business are done by only one person–collaboration is necessary. There is someone who does research, collects data, enters data, approves, disapproves, makes edits, etc… information getting “lost in that paper shuffle” would not be surprising right?

With online collaboration you have instant version control when someone checks out a document. Even better is that you have the ability to grant or restrict visibility of a single document down to the user level.

And because of the check in/out process a history of changes is automatically created and you can track who made the edits. Thats a sort of audit trail for your information..

Automating collaboration and workflow maybe isn’t the first thing on a business owners list of things to do. But perhaps it should be. Just in the simple example I illustrated here it is clear that collaborating in the cloud is a no brainer–and soon to be essecntial if you want to keep up with your competition. Time equals money and automated workflow saves both. Think of the endless possibilities for all departments of your company.

This type of document management solution is much more than just handy, it is really necessary for any collaborative environment, especially when documents are highly distributed.