Winning the war over chaotic business data

Have you ever considered automating your enterprise content management (ECM) system? If you haven’t, then ask yourself this, how much data resides in your ECM sites, and how many sites do you have? Then ask how your compliance officers cope with data proliferation and the risk of lost documents? Finally do you know what your business’ financial costs are in terms of the offsite storage and retrieval of paper documents? If you struggle to answer any of these questions with any sort of confidence then automation is a valid consideration.

The reason for this is that ECM encompasses the strategies, methods, and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organisational processes. More so than ever, it is the ECM system which is helping your business manage its data.

That data comes in many forms, from well managed line-of-business systems, such as a CRM or ERP system, which provide a company’s structured data, to the unstructured – such as paper and electronic documents. Do understand that structured data accounts for only a small amount of information within an organisation.  The majority of data, documents and other files created by a business are not in a database or LOB system, so are unstructured and unmanaged.  It is this data which represents enormous potential value if it is managed efficiently and with the intent of driving business forward.

ECM takes this often chaotic mix of unstructured data sat on the shared network drive, on desktops, or in emails, and puts it into a manageable structure that is appropriate to your business. When handling both structured and unstructured data, ECM helps avoid the chaos of duplication, rework and wasted time and money.

Widely deployed in organisations of every size in every country Microsoft SharePoint has become the most popular ECM on the market. But many businesses are still looking for new ways to gain more value from their existing deployment, and this is where automation can drive a business forward if you adhere to some basic rules.

Remember, your ECM system will only ever be as good as its index, so plan how your ECM is to be automated. Consider the taxonomy and think departmental within the enterprise, ask your employees how they do things before you change anything, especially at departmental levels, and then establish a roll-out plan with executive-level sponsorship.

When rolling out ensure there is consideration of the needs for a ‘manual to automated’ migration, and create consistency across paper and electronic content.

Crucially automate classification for easy retrieval by automating metadata creation. We all use metadata to varying extents, but by making this core to an automated ECM you provide your business with easily searchable content, both new and historical, which helps speed up document retrieval,  reducing manual work and improving the user experience.  For the business, this means no more bottlenecks in the workflow, processes are faster and more compliant and the company can gain crucial business agility in the marketplace.

Related articles

• SharePoint Surge Continues but Strategies are Lacking (prweb.com)
• The Mandate to Go Paperless (advancingthepaperlessoffice.com)

Supercharge your ECM with SharePoint Server 2010 and document management

The goal of an enterprise content management (ECM) system, a fully integrated, collaborative platform and architectural framework, is to seamlessly connect a company’s business processes, workers, and information business-wide. For many businesses, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, tying together traditional content management, social capabilities, and search will be the foundation for the next-generation of ECM systems.

To increase the speed and efficiency of your business, it’s important not to just think about how the information is handled in your ECM system, but also how it is brought inside, because your ECM system is only as valuable as the information contained within it and the ease of retrieval of that information. ECM solutions have historically been an amalgam of segmented systems, with silos of documents and information which do not communicate well (or at all) with each other. At best they have required individual point-to-point connections to be set up and managed. This is no longer the case if SharePoint2010 is deployed in conjunction with ReadSoft.

According to the Association of Information and Image Management (AIIM), there are a series of key improvements to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 that help position the platform as an optimal home for ECM. When working in parallel with document automation from ReadSoft, these improvements give a stronger platform upon which to manage unstructured data in a productive manner:

1. SharePoint 2010 offers an absolute, persistent link reference to objects – regardless of file renames or content moves – with Document ID. Given that one of the greatest benefits of ECM systems is their ability to send content in a link rather than email attachments, Document ID represents a monumental leap forward.
2. SharePoint documents, blogs, wikis, web pages, and list items can be declared records in SharePoint Server 2010 with In-Place Records Management. With Hierarchical File Plans, lists can be created that can run up to the millions of items, essential for managing physical objects on any sort of scale.
3. Related documents can be grouped together so they share metadata, have a common homepage, same workflows, and integrated archival process with Document Set.
4. Metadata-driven refinement panels, content indexing, and the ability to search and retrieve data from content sources both inside and outside of SharePoint with SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search and FAST Search deliver ‘true’ enterprise-level search capabilities.
5. SharePoint 2010 establishes enterprise-level taxonomy by enabling users to create the structure – including hierarchy, product categories, and worldwide locations – and publish it to SharePoint by utilising Metadata Store.
6. In SharePoint 2007, the Business Data Catalogue enabled users to connect data from CRM and ERP systems into SharePoint, but just in read-only mode. SharePoint 2010 offers greater extensibility, presentation, and editing for line -of-business applications and data with Business Connectivity Services.
7. SharePoint provides a number of reports based upon audit data – rather than just at the site collection level, it now reports on at the site collection, site, list/library, and/or item level. When auditing in SharePoint 2007 only some events would be logged, and files opened in the browser did not have the same level of security so might not offer the user an option to view in read-only or edit mode.

When SharePoint 2010 is combined with the powerful OCR data capture, extraction and indexing capabilities of ReadSoft’s platform, both of which cover many unstructured content types, simple and valuable use of business information can be fully realised.