Paperless Office - 1

Over 30 years ago we all saw visions of a "paperless office" shown to us by companies such as IBM. Wind forward to 2009 and the technology is available but if anything we have even more paperwork to keep us occupied.
Much of this paperwork is scanned to create an electronic document or is already in electronic form such as a Word document or a Sage invoice.
Once in electronic form the paper copy can be dispensed with and electronic filing is far superior to anything in the physical world. Want to file a document by date - that's easy! Want to file it by supplier number, name, buyer, item type etc all at the same time. Not so easy with paper documents but no problem with document management. Try using Windows Explorer to achieve this.
Of course computers can go up in flames or drown in floods the same as paper can, but try taking a backup of all your paperwork.
Also paper is less secure than electronic files which have been encrypted so that it needs the application to read it.
Travelling away from the office? Suddenly realise that you don't have some vital papers in your laptop? Laptop has gone kaput? If you can get to the internet you can get your documents via web versions of EDM (Electronic Document Management).
Picking up lots of papers / brochures on your travels? Carry a small portable scanner such as the Canon P-150 and scan them in as you go. These can be loaded into your EDM when you get back to the office or when you next log onto the web.....
..............................................................................................To Be Continued

Kodak Scanners

We mainly recommend Kodak scanners such as i1220: http://www.scanningtechnology.co.uk/acatalog/_Kodak_i1220_Light_Duty_Scanner.html which comes with a 3 year warranty.
If you need to scan A3 the i160 is well worth considering : http://www.scanningtechnology.co.uk/acatalog/Kodak_i160_Light_Duty_Scanner.html
They are very well made, robust and produce a high quality image using Perfect Page image processing which works wonders with cleaning up, de-skewing the image etc.

Legal Issues of Document Management

In most situations, electronic filing will not, in itself, be a major legal issue: the more important challenge for the business manager is to judge what to keep, for how long, and how to ensure that documents remain easily accessible. A good electronic filing system will almost certainly serve this purpose better than the paper originals.
To find out more click here http://www.filestreamsystems.co.uk/document-management-legal.html

Document Management Support

We never know when the phone rings what it will bring. Is it someone selling something we don't want or is it someone wanting the local BSS depot who's number is almost identical to ours?

Hopefully its someone wanting to buy our software or an existing customer who has a question or problem we can address.

Being a small company we can usually deal with most questions fairly quickly, but some take a bit longer than the 4hrs response. Quite a few of the problems are outside of our software but changes in the IT environment can affect our system e.g. Windows updates. So we often end up helping to fix a problem which is not within File Stream.

Another Monday

Where would we be without Monday! There would be no weekend. No Monday morning hangovers / groans / complaints. Pack all the rubbish into one day and enjoy the rest of the week.

Meanwhile back in EDM corner I'm wondering how long paper documents will be around for? Probably longer than we think.

We type stuff into a PC so someone else can print it off e.g. invoice, proof of delivery, Google map etc. Then often someone else keys the information back into another system so they can print the same information in a different format e.g. remittance advice, credit note etc. And following on the two wheel theme - documents being couriered from one place to another instead of travelling down a wire. We use to sell fax machines, but we don't use one any more unless forced to. Long live email.

Document Management & Motorcycling

What does motorcycling and document management have in common - not a lot! But somehow we've ended up with three of us in a small company heavily involved in both.

One involves getting round corners quickly without falling off and the other turns all your documents into electronic files that you can backup and easily find again. No synergy there, so lets forget that combined theme!

We have a new web version of our DM and its giving us a few issues to fix. Its powerful but needs a lot of juice to get it to run well. Its OK for short local journeys but giving a few problems with longer ones. We're putting some test riders and development engineers to work on it and after techie mutterings in dark corners it should get sorted. Then we can properly road test it. Its on our roadmap already.