Recently I received an email from a potential customer that said the following, “Can you give me a brief description of the difference of using your company as opposed to setting up folders on the computer?”

My response was a brief look at what document management software is and how it can increase productivity. Although I don’t get that question often, I wondered how many people might have similar questions that they would like answered as well.

Many companies have heard of the term ‘Document management’ but aren’t completely sure how document management solutions differ from just storing documents on your computer in folders. There are several differences, and they all come down to usability and productivity.

First, let’s look at search abilities between these two choices. As you increase the number of folders and hierarchy of folders, search ability of your documents decreases. Although Windows has some search functions, it relies on you knowing which folder and what the title of the document is that you are looking for. This becomes increasingly difficult if you are searching for more than one document or aren’t sure what exact file you’re looking for. This method increases the chance that you will lose files or waste precious time searching for those files. With a document management software, specifically eDoc Organizer, searching for a document doesn’t become increasingly more difficult with the growing number of documents you have stored in the program. With eDoc Organizer, you can search by any content within the document, title, date or comments made about the document or by labels you put on the document. This makes searching for one or many documents easy and time effective.

A document management solution does everything folders on your computer do but more easily and more efficiently. A document management solution will also have significantly more features to increase productivity. Some of the features that eDoc Organizer offers that do this is versioning, which allows you to keep copies of each new version of a document; recycle bin, which ensures you don’t lose a document that is deleted accidentally; and permissions, which allows the administrator on the account to control which documents each user has access to and what they are allowed to do with those documents. Permissions specifically allow for a regulated, audit friendly environment for any industry. We also have specific features to help get any information into the system easily, such as screen capture, which lets you create a document from anything you see on your screen; eDoc printer, which creates a PDF from any application that has a print function, and folder monitoring, which imports documents into eDoc Organizer automatically that are added to specific folders on your computer. You can always import or scan your paper documents into the program, and they will be converted and saved as PDF’s. Then you can search for these documents in a variety of ways, by content within the document, date, comments, title or labels attached to the document. Finally, you can also export, email or print a document directly from within eDoc Organizer. As you can see, eDoc Organizer helps you get any information into the system, search and share all while giving you the ability to do so quickly and easily.

Every document management solution is different to some degree, but the overall goal is to make managing your documents easier and more efficient. To read about all of eDoc Organizer’s features, go to our website www.edocorganizer.com

While storing a few documents on your home computer might work well for some people, a document management solution is needed for busy families and especially businesses of all sizes. By saving time, eliminating lost documents, and bundling processes such as finding and sending documents, a document management solution such as eDoc Organizer is an essential tool for everyone.