Document Management is about bringing your documents under control. It is about automating your business processes to improve efficiency. Making it easier for staff to do their jobs, easier to carry out tasks and easier to find the information they need.

It should bring order to the information chaos that is growing in every organisation. Your documents should be in the right place at the right time to enable your business to function efficiently.

What should you be thinking about?

If you are looking to implement a DM solution what sort of things should you be thinking about? There are many factors to take into account but here are some of the major ones.

Search

Easy information discovery is a critical element of your system. One of the key drivers for adding documents into a managed environment is the ability to find those documents more easily. Full text searching will get you part of the way but using metadata to index your documents will take you one step further. Do you know what metadata you will want to capture for your different types of documents?

Ease of use

Directly linked to user adoption is the systems ease of use. Too often DM systems are implemented that actually make the users life more difficult rather than easier. Is the system going to be built in a way that will make tasks easy to accomplish?

Security

Business processes require that only authorized individuals carry out the tasks they are allocated. Do you know who is entitled to carry out which actions?

Compliance

In a time of increasing legislation all organizations are finding themselves under increasing scrutiny. What is the legislation that applies to your organization? What are the industry standards that you can follow to comply with established best practices?

Workflow

Another key benefit of DM systems is their ability to integrate with workflow system in a controlled manner. Suddenly those processes that have evolved can be written down and accomplished through easy to use workflow. Have you identified the processes that you want to bring under control?

Interfaces

How are your users going to use the system? Will they all have the same requirements? It is unlikely. For some users it will be no more than a new location to store there files. For others it will be a resource for discovery of enterprise information. Some will use the workflow to drive business process as their main working activity. Have you analysed the impact on your users?

Ixxus and Document Management

Ixxus have experience of building solutions with Alfresco. Whether it is building complex content models, designing intricate workflows, customising user interfaces or whatever is needed to deliver the solution that is right for your business. Ixxus understand what it takes to get there.

Our consultants have experience with a range of DM systems but Alfresco is our choice of product for Document Management. This has allowed our consultants to cultivate a deep understanding of the product. Alfresco’s open architecture enables us to rapidly develop solutions that fit our customer’s needs.

Our extensive work with Alfresco has required that we develop best practices in the implementation of Alfresco. We have developed an in-house framework for developing DM solutions that give our projects a solid foundation to build on.

We have implemented various Document Management solutions, e.g. Publishing, Invoice Processing, Quality Assurance and Scanning solutions. These solutions have been implemented in various sectors, manufacturing, trade unions telecoms and the public sector.