Cutting The Clutter: Digital Tools for Document Storage and Management
The paperless office is a dream that’s rapidly becoming reality, thanks in no small part to the wide variety of digital document management systems on the market today.
These systems address the varied needs of all shapes and sizes of businesses — from giant bureaucracies to single entrepreneurs. They’ve grown to play an especially important role in the financial, legal, healthcare and government sectors.
There are cloud-based and in-house document management systems. Each has advantages. Cloud services don’t require software installation and updates and will run on different platforms. Data stored on desktop systems remains in-house: since it doesn’t have to be transported to an outside cloud server, there’s less drain on bandwidth.
Document management systems offer many benefits: they save time, money and space, improve workflow and productivity, streamline record-keeping, enable secure file sharing, eliminate lost or misfiled papers and automate redundant processes.
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Here’s a sampling of some of the leading products:
Lucion
Lucion’s FileCenter is desktop document management software designed for small offices. It offers scanning and file organization along with with PDF creation and editing. PDFs are easily searchable. Files can be securely shared.
Nuance
Nuance’s Clintegrity Electronic Document Management is tailored to the complex and unique needs of the healthcare industry. Patient accounts and medical records are stored digitally and can be accessed throughout an institution and beyond.
Clintegrity facilitates the managing and tracking of documents, including patient disclosures for HIPAA compliance. It’s a single web-based platform that enables access both within the medical facility and to remote users and providers.
FutureVault
New York-based C-Suite Network is now offering FutureVault’s Digital Collaborative Vault as a service to its network of corporate senior executives.
FutureVault is a cloud-based digital safety deposit box for financial, legal and personal documents.
A unique FutureVault feature is its patent-pending Trusted Advisors, which enables clients to easily share documents with a network of advisors, such as lawyers, brokers and family members.
FutureVault executive chairman G Scott Paterson explains that the system will fill a critical gap for companies like C-Suite Networks that need to organize and access complex document systems. In an article from earlier this year, Paterson also described the company’s ambitions, which includes growing and scaling FutureVault into a major global organization and continuing to build and buy top FinTech software.
Docear
In academia, the ability to create and rapidly distribute documents like research papers puts unique demands on document management systems. Students need to be able to quickly retrieve what they’re looking for. Docear is free open-source software created specifically to help organize, create and discover academic literature. Users can sort documents into categories, sort annotations and highlighted text into categories. Its “literature suite concept” offers PDF and reference management. A recommender system guides users to new literature that they can download in full-text.
For smaller businesses and individuals, there are solid offerings from some of the leaders in cloud-based applications, including Google Drive for Work, Microsoft OneDrive for Business and Dropbox Business.
