HowNow® Documents Screen

The Documents screen in HowNow® Knowledge Manager is where your team can quickly and easily find any procedure, checklist, template, workpaper, standard letter, precedent, reference material, training resource, FAQ, web link or any piece of documented know-how you wish to add to HowNow®.

The Documents screen is the search screen for your organisation's knowledgebase and systems manual:

Easy Document Search. Find things fast.

Type a keyword or phrase and HowNow® instantly displays a list of relevant documents. You don't even have to press Enter, it's that quick. You can easily shorten the search results list further by clicking on a filter on the left of the screen, such as:

• Procedural Area: The area or function of the company, such as Production, Clients, Administration, Finance, Team (HR and OH&S), Leadership, Marketing. You can customise this list however you like, renaming areas, deleting areas or adding your own areas, including adding sub-areas. For example, one click on Team will list every procedure, document and template relating to Human Resources (HR) and Occupational Health & Safety (OH&S) in your organisation.

• Document Type: With one click you can filter your search results by the type of document you are looking for, such as Procedures, Checklists, Forms, Letters, Workpapers, Reference, Web Pages, and so on. You can customise this list too.

• Topic: This powerful feature allows your team, with one click, to display a list of every document and template that relates to a particular Topic. Customise this list of Topics (and Sub-Topics) into whatever is relevant for your organisation.

Note that these filters are not folders or locations on your network, they are attributes of the documents, no matter where they are stored on your network. That's one reason it is so fast to find your documents using HowNow®, and why most intranets and document management systems are so slow at finding documents. Any system that relies on users knowing where documents are stored is fundamentally flawed because a 'browse to the folder' approach is inefficient once you are managing more than 100 or so documents. Staff simply cannot remember where everything is stored.

An example: Your organisation needs to create a new email address for a new employee but the person who usually does that is away on leave. Simply by typing 'new email' the staff member would find a list of procedures, standard documents and reference and training documents that match those search criteria. One click on the Procedures document type filter on the left of the screen and that list of documents instantly shortens to display only procedures, and the 'Creating Email Addresses' procedure is easily found. Without knowing where this document was stored on the network, it was was found in seconds. HowNow®, how easy.

Easy Version Control. Achieve Consistent Quality.

HowNow® only displays one version of each document; your approved, up-to-date and compliant version. This means you can be sure your team are all working off the same master version of important documents such as procedures, checklists, workpapers, forms and standard letters.

In addition to the enormous time saving this produces for your business —no more reinvention of the wheel with different staff members creating their own versions of documents—you will find your firm will quickly achieve excellent consistency in the work being produced.

An example: In our accounting firm clients, we typically find that average review times for jobs reduce from approximately 2 hours to around 30 minutes simply because all jobs are being prepared using the same checklists and workpapers, no matter which staff member is doing the work. Achieving high quality levels in a fraction of the time is just one example of the efficiency gains you will achieve by implementing HowNow® to systemise and standardise your operations.

Automatically Filter Out Irrelevant Documents

There's little point in a document search engine quickly presenting search results if the list of documents is not relevant to the user. The time taken wading through search results needs to be taken into account in the 'search speed'.

The Document Visibility feature in HowNow® filters out documents from a user's search based on their role in the organisation. HowNow® hides these documents from their view. This keeps search results clean and uncluttered.

An example: When a person in your professional team does a search in HowNow®, they don't want to see documents in the list that relate to the administration team. And vice versa. That wastes everyone's time. By assigning a document to a particular Team or Teams, HowNow® will only display those documents to staff members in those Teams.

Easy Content Management

There's nothing much more off-putting to a staff member when using an intranet or knowledgebase than for them to do a search and open a document only to find that it is out of date.

Not only is this frustrating for the staff member—who might then revert to saving their own versions of documents to their computer and give up using the central system for future searches—it increases your firm's professional indemnity risk if staff base jobs or advice on out of date documentation.

HowNow® makes it easy for you to ensure your documents are up-to-date, in two ways:

• Expiry Dates with Expiry Actions: When you add a document to HowNow®, if you know that the document will either become out-of-date at a particular point in time, or risks being out of date at that time, you can assign an expiry date and tell HowNow® to either hide the document from users from that date, or to warn them upon opening the document. When you are managing many hundreds of procedures, checklists, standard documents and reference documents, you simply cannot rely on staff to remember to find and update out-of-date documents. It doesn't happen in the real world. Let HowNow® do this for you.

• Automatic Content Update Services: In addition to the HowNow® Business content that applies to all types of businesses, in some industries such as accounting and financial services, businessfitness™ offers content subscription and update services. This content includes generic procedures, checklists, workpapers, forms, standard letters and reference material that has been extensively researched and QA'd to save your business the considerable expense and opportunity cost of doing this content work internally. Content Updates are published regularly. These documents automatically download into your HowNow® content, on your server. You don't have to go to a web site to download and then save the content into HowNow®. (Other content services are still using this labour-intensive process of forcing their subscribers to go to their web site to get the content.) When the content comes into your HowNow®, if you have modified the previous version supplied by businessfitness™, the updated version will not overwrite your changes. Instead, the document will be placed on a Review List in HowNow® so you can compare it with your version and later accept or reject the new version. It's never been so easy to keep your systems up-to-date.

The Long List of Additional Features Includes ...

• Any type of document or file can be saved into HowNow®, including the obvious types such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF, but also multimedia audio and video files (MPEG, MP3, WAV, WMA, etc.). This means you can use HowNow® to easily manage your training and induction videos.

• Web page Favourites can be centrally managed by HowNow®. Web browsers such as Internet Explorer allow users to save a list of web pages they visit frequently, however these Favourites are only stored on the individual's computer. This misses an excellent knowledge sharing opportunity because some people consider their list of web Favourites to be one of their most useful resources. It makes sense for staff to share these resources with each other. Another advantage of storing your company-approved web pages in HowNow® is that your team can keyword search on them to quickly find exactly the web page they are looking for. Your staff will love this feature. One click on the Document Type filter of Web Pages to instantly see the centrally stored (and approved!) list of web pages that relate to their role. Type in a keyword or phrase and this list instantly shortens. The right web page, found in seconds. HowNow® can also store the Username and Password information with each link. This saves your organisation from having to maintain a cumbersome record (typically an Excel file) listing out all the web sites and login details for staff. The Document Visibility feature explained earlier can also be applied to web pages, so you can choose to hide links from particular Teams in your organisation.

• Users can create their own list of Favourite documents yet still be working off the centrally stored and approved master versions of the documents. This gives users quick and easy access to the collection of documents they use often, and it gives users a degree of customisation which increases staff buy-in: staff do not like using systems that are not flexible enough to be customised to their own particular needs.

• Master versions of documents are protected from modification. Documents opened through HowNow® open in read-only format so that the master versions are protected from being changed by anyone other than the designated HowNow® Administrator(s). Standard users can still use a read-only document but they cannot save their changes back over the master version. You can also choose to make selected documents open in an editable format so that staff can edit the master version. This applies in some cases, such as courier logs, mail ledgers, staff meeting agendas, etc., where it is OK for staff to edit these directly as they are not a template or standard document.

• Review List function makes it easy to manage the updating and review process of your documents in HowNow® between various team members who can be assigned Author and Reviewer permissions. A prominent notice appears at the bottom of the screen when items are added to that user's Review List.

• Revision History Notes can be attached to each version of a document, to assist in your compliance with ISO 9001:2000 'Quality management systems - requirements' and other professional body standards and regulations.

• News List function provides an easy-to-use company-wide news headline function. You can send News items to all staff members, selected staff members, particular teams, particular Reviewers, and/or particular Partners/Directors in the organisation. A prominent notice appears at the bottom of the screen when items are added to that user's News List.

• Users can be immediately prompted (and required) to centrally file their document before they can use it. For example, a template checklist can be flagged so that when a staff member opens the checklist, they are immediately prompted to save it into a client subfolder on your network. This ensures much more consistent and standardised electronic filing of documents.

• Merge letters and documents can be populated with client data directly from your existing client database. This saves you from having to manage yet another database. HowNow® will easily integrate with your existing database.

• Merge letters are automatically filed into the correct client folders on your network. When HowNow® does a document merge, it automatically files each individual document into its correct client subfolder on your network. This is a huge time saving for your administration staff and it removes the opportunity for human error in the electronic filing of documents.

• Customise the formatting of ALL letters simultaneously by editing the Master Style Template upon which these letters are based.

• Add your company logo to the screen in the lower left corner and add your company name and slogan to the top of the screen. This enhances your staff's feeling of ownership, that HowNow® is theirs.

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How to Purchase

Please contact us at businessfitness™ for purchase options and pricing details. After a brief needs analysis to assess which modules and options will be relevant to your organisation's needs, we will provide you with a proposal.

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