10 Reasons why Windows Explorer Isn’t Managing your Documents.
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There is a difference between ‘storing’ your documents and ‘managing’ your documents. Paper and electronic files can both be stored, but it doesn’t mean they are being managed. 10 Reasons Why Windows Explorer Is Costing You Time and Money.
1. Templates Can Be Easily Overwritten
Your standard documents and templates are easily overwritten or populated with client data.
Once the template document is overwritten, it is very difficult to recover the original – if you find out in time, you may be able to recover from backup, but think of all the wasted time and effort.
3. Lack of Information About Who Accessed Documents
Generally there is very little knowledge of who has accessed a file, modified, copied or emailed a file. It is extremely important that you have an audit trail of all actions performed against any document that exists in your organisation. Windows Explorer will not provide this level of functionality and the integrity of your documents and templates cannot be ensured.
5. It is Too Easy to Move or Delete Folders
Users can accidentally move or delete folders – search the web and see all the problems that are caused by users moving or worse, deleting folders when they are browsing.
Mostly it has accidentally been dragged to another location, but can be quite difficult to find. Worse, it could have been deleted.
7. The Inability to Filter Costs Time
In Windows Explorer because you must browse, you can’t filter on; who created it, who modified it and who is the owner of a specific document.
This can be of real importance when locating documents and can cost valuable time.
9. Emails – a Critical Part of our Communications
When using Windows Explorer to keep all of the organisation’s files, there is no management of emails.
In most organisations, it is not common practice for emails to be saved on a network drive. The usual practice is to create folders within each user’s Inbox for various clients or topics and very often “Sent” emails are forgotten, so the communication trail is lost.
2. Inadequate Control of Template Versions
Is this the latest up-to-date template you are working from? Does everyone know where to access the latest template? Even if they know the appropriate shared drive on the network, often the structure can go through many sub-folders before a template is found.Change control on templates is not adequate when using Windows Explorer. There is no control to make sure that your templates are not overwritten with client data.
4. Lack of Consistency in Creating Folders
Standards and consistency are important for any business. You can educate your team on your requirements, but human errors can be made.
What happens over time is that you have an oversupply of folders and sub-folders which become inconsistent over a number of years – it is very difficult to bring this back into a structured format.
6. You Need to Know Where to Find Documents
In Windows Explorer, or any folder based search, you need to know where a file has been saved to be able to find it quickly.
There are too many clicks to get to the required folder and you can only look in one folder at a time. There is limited filtering functionality and you cannot determine the status of a document just by looking at it.
8. Control over Versions of Documents
In Windows Explorer, new versions of documents are not automatically created; it requires the user to remember to use ‘File>Save As’ to create a new version of the document, if they want to be able to access the document the way it was, prior to a set of changes or edits. If errors have been made, there is nothing to go back to, unless you resort to a backed up file.
10. No Identification of Saved Emails
Even when emails are saved, there is no way to identify those that have or, more importantly, those that have not been saved to a network drive.
A good document management system will save you time, money and just possibly a law suit.
HOWNOW DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT
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CAMERON MASON
The Insight Company
