There is an increased dependency on digital documents, excels and presentations these days for running a business. Also increasing is the dependency on cloud storage for storing these files till they need to be viewed or retrieved. This has paved way for Document management services to take shape in our world as high-speed internet, scanning hardware and disk storage are witnessing big drops in prices.
Document management software are becoming more popular with all kinds of businesses, size & scale notwithstanding. Most among the software come with a host of services and features that may or may not suit your business.
Evaluate the following factors before taking a final call:
Ease of Integration
Any DMS you choose should be easy to integrate with your current business software such your ERP or accounting software, and hardware such as scanner, printer, desktop etc. This ensures that you don’t need to invest in any new electronics or software to go hand-in-hand with your chosen DMS. A quick integration also means quicker downloads and processing resulting in more accurate trail for any work done on the software
Search Feature
Since DMS is about retrieving data as and when required, the search feature has to be extremely elaborate and extremely quick with fetching the results. Different kinds of searches such full text search can be extremely instrumental in finding files which have been incorrectly named.
Customizable
Since every organization cannot have the same needs or requirements from a DMS, it is essential that the software should be customizable at any point. A small company may grow bigger one day, and the requirements may change. A good DMS will always be easily scalable, increasing in features and storage size as per demand. Similarly, some come with very specific features such as optical character recognition, portability that can be added as per your business’ requirement.
Access to multiple users
A solid document management services system will come with multi-user access since the feature improves productivity among group members while increasing co-ordination within the respective groups for effective execution of the tasks. A feature to allocate access level also comes in very handy when assigning access to ensure that the right people are able to make any required edits.
Back up & Format Compatibility
Ensure that the DMS you are currently evaluating supports all the basic file formats, along with the formats your business runs on. Along with the file formats, the software should ideally have the feature of being able to retrieve previous versions of the stored documents that have been edited.
User Reviews
Always do a thorough research about the brand online and know what others are saying. Software with proven track records can rarely go wrong with their service. However, to be surer, if your DMS provider claims that they have provided DMS solutions to certain businesses, you may contact the clients personally to get honest reviews about the product.
