Top 7 Benefits of Using SharePoint Online for Document Management

Document Management

Electronic or printed documents are a crucial part of almost every organization. It can be challenging to manage business knowledge, which frequently comes from multiple sources. Depending on the nature of your business, a document management system (DMS) that gathers, saves, and retrieves both paper and digital documents, records and other content can provide your firm with several significant advantages. Enterprise document management is often one of the operations businesses want to streamline and automate because it is a time-consuming area, and is prone to human mistakes and has a fundamental impact on overall organizational efficiency. As a result, investment in document management software is rising year after year. The purpose of Microsoft’s SharePoint Online platform is to assist staff in seamlessly sharing and managing content and knowledge. SharePoint Online Document management is a cloud-based service and capability that can be used from any location at any time, and it offers the newest and fine-grained cloud security mechanisms to keep your company’s confidential information safe, organized, and compliant.

What is SharePoint Document Management:

The document management system (DMS) is software that tracks and supports a document’s entire life cycle. The processes that make up a document’s life cycle start with its generation and ends ultimately with its disposition and destruction. A DMS, which covers every evolving aspect of the document and every specific change, revision, and usage, can be used to generate document renditions and save and track them through each version. Having a sound management system is crucial. Making the appropriate choice is equally crucial. SharePoint is one of the most robust and full features and economical solutions out of all the document management platforms on the market.

Through simultaneous usage and multi-user activities, SharePoint is a collaboration platform that enables businesses to store and manage straightforward to complex data management solutions. In 2001, Microsoft SharePoint was released. Since its creation, Microsoft has produced iterations of SharePoint, to satisfy ever increasing client feature demand. By automating the document lifecycle SharePoint DMS improves employee performance by 20% and reduces operational costs by 55%, when Search capabilities are taken into account.

Benefits of Using SharePoint Online for Document Management

1. Improved Data Security:

Critical documents can be maintained securely by restricting user access with a document control system. The SharePoint online document management solution from Microsoft also offers an additional degree of security by enabling the owner to monitor user access through compliance controls including audits and reports. Data loss risk can be reduced with refined policies, coupled with legal holds, record management, retention policies, and recycle bin policies. The compliance and security center also ensures proper control at every level.

2. Sharing Of Documents:

How do you get your coworkers’ opinions on a document? Do you generate a document and distribute it to your coworkers for revision and feedback? Do all users return individual files to you after editing them? In that case, you manually compile all revisions and comments into a single file. This is simply too much effort. Managing document comments, reviews, and changes is significantly more intelligent using SharePoint and MS-Office combined. Multiple people can read and edit the file with the help of permissions, workflow, and approvals all in real-time. Each person’s feedback is in the file, with versions retained and available for comparison within the MS-Office client.  The document automatically consolidates the remarks, comments, changes and overall process.

3. Versioning:

Have any files on your file-sharing system been given names resembling “Proposal v3 – final – rev 2 – final”? Ever begin altering a document only to discover that it wasn’t the most recent revision? SharePoint’s versioning tools enable you to maintain the version history in a centrally accessible single file location. Every time the document is saved, a new version is added to the list automatically, with full audit trail and rollback capability. You can always go back to an earlier version if you desire. Users can remark on revisions made to their version. Users can even keep track of major and minor versions (which they may publish).

4. Metadata:

In SharePoint online, metadata is extra information you may keep track of about documents. Imagine it as similar to the folders in your file sharing but with the added ability to generate various metadata fields with a rich range of datatypes. For instance, your file share might contain a folder structure by department followed by a hierarchy by the project. However, some projects are managed by several departments. How can you gather in one location all the documents for these cross-departmental projects? 

You might add a column for each department and a separate column for each project in SharePoint. Then, you might use one (or both) of these columns to filter and sort the data. To locate files being worked on by three departments for Project ABC, you might simply filter for “Project ABC.” It takes some time to adjust to this new method of file organization. However, once you do, the team will have far easier access to files than ever.  These metadata fields also supercharge search, allowing the metadata to take front-seat as “Refiners” for quickly zooming in on the right search results.

5. Regulation Observance:

Critical industries such as healthcare, law, and finance must abide closely by regulatory standards and requirements. Everything is made simpler with a document management system, including audit reports and security settings that follow precise compliance standards at every stage.

6. Effective Team Collaboration:

Version control is a crucial component of SharePoint that keeps track of every alteration made to the content, along with the date, time, and user who made it. Additionally, it enables multiple concurrent person editing to avoid having a daisy-chain of people waiting to make their updates. Teams work more collaboratively when they can share and modify files in real time. Thanks to SharePoint, multiple users can easily collaborate on the same page at once. It is possible for a sales representative, engineer, and marketing coordinator to work on the same proposal simultaneously. When users are working on a portion, SharePoint cleverly locks that section and modifies the document when changes are made.

7. Workflow And Anytime, Anywhere Access

Office 365’s SharePoint workflows, such as Microsoft Flow, are miniature programs with a no-code/low code footprint that speed up company operations. Workflows can include obtaining approvals for a document, gathering comments, or informing the team each time a person has finished adding their input to a document or integrating with external systems. The desktops (PC or Mac), the web, and mobile devices all support SharePoint. You have access to your workpapers from any location at any time.

Conclusion:

The SharePoint document management solution is effective and advantageous for businesses of all sizes. Any company, large or small, may, with the right implementation, increase team efficiency and cooperation while managing documents. Microsoft DMS is definitely worth the cost, among its many other advantages. Contact RealityTech if your firm needs to clear the clutter and step up to enterprise class cutting-edge document management. Our business has extensive expertise and experience providing document management systems to businesses of all sizes. Punnaka is one of the top premium business listing websites in Australia.

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