Social Document Management Systems vs Traditional Document Management Systems

social intranet document management system

The idea of document management is changing. How companies manage documents is changing too. Let’s take a brief look at the history of document management and how it compares to today’s document management software.

What’s the difference?

Let’s dig right in …

Traditional Document Management Software (Old School)

Typically, a traditional document management system acts like a dumping ground for documents. Files are saved, but they are not easy to search through or find. Comments are usually not enabled either. They are rarely flexible enough and cannot adapt to the way your company actually works.

Furthermore, traditional document management systems can become quite expensive to maintain after some usage. They typically rely on intensive categorization and classifications to retrieve, use, and distribute documents. They do not give you much flexibility in naming or setting up new categories or relationships between files. And they also usually require expert developer assistance to set up and maintain.

While some of these traditional document management systems offer tons of features, they do not enable the open flow of information that is necessary for collaboration. Finding the necessary files you need can take a lot of time. It may also be difficult to understand the relationships between files, it may become difficult to manage version control and authorizations, and it may be hard to locate files … resulting in confusion and lost efficiency.

Social Document Management Software (The New Way)

social intranet document management software

On the other hand, when you work with a social intranet document management system, you are able to create and organize files based upon relevancy to your workflow and add commentary in multiple ways, such as comments, likes, and ratings.

With intranet document management, your documents are organized in a way that is most suitable for your search and access. You can limit distribution for sensitive documents down to the page level while enabling documents, types of documents, or project-specific documents to be available to people who need to see them.

You can manage versions and choose who can see, upload, and delete files in each folder so your content is always organized and up to date. You can also gain a quick overview of the latest status of projects or documents easily. Social intranet document management systems enable you to review entire documents before downloading using the file viewer and then share these documents quickly with others.

People can also follow documents so that they receive notifications whenever the documents are updated or new versions are published. They will also receive notifications whenever someone comments, rates or likes a document. This keeps people in the loop and makes collaboration on documents much easier.

In Conclusion

A social intranet document management system enables you to create, edit, and manage your business documents in one place efficiently through their lifecycle. It offers your company features and collaborative knowledge management tools beyond the limitations of traditional document management systems.

 

The Undeniable Benefits of Having a Well-Designed Document Management System


 

Author
Written by

Tim Eisenhauer is a co-founder of Axero Solutions, a leading intranet software vendor. He's also a bestselling author of Who the Hell Wants to Work for You? Mastering Employee Engagement. Tim’s been featured in Fortune, Forbes, TIME, Inc Magazine, Entrepreneur, CNBC, Today, and other leading publications.

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