When it comes to determining a company file structure best practice, there are a variety of technologies one can choose to accomplish this objective.
If you don’t have the budget for technology at the moment, even though our solutions start as low as $9.95 per month with eFileCabinet Express, be sure to opt in to a future solution with the following features to ensure your company-wide file structure will serve you long term.
Adjustable Zonal Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
Zonal OCR lets users select relevant fields within regularly used documents, and then select those fields in a way where the system, in automated fashion, recognizes and sends the files into appropriate storage repositories once scanned. This means that Zonal OCR automates a process that would otherwise take hours over the span of multiple workweeks.
Essentially, Zonal OCR is a Natural Language Processor (NLP) technology, and is prevalent in the DMS space—particularly in vendors’ Cloud-Based, Online company file structure best practice solutions.
Zonal OCR improves the efficiency of searches, reducing the time spent looking for documents, and therefore increasing an organizations’ savings.
Zonal OCR reaches “Adjustable” status once it can entail both default settings and user-specified settings for content and file searches. As organizations become more granular in their purposes and objectives, this kind of malleability will prove useful.
Furthermore, Zonal OCR retrieves metadata from documents automatically, and an overwhelming majority of DMS vendors’ Zonal OCR is Windows based, although other operating systems, like OS X for Mac, are gaining strong enough footholds in the enterprise to become part of DMS vendors’ innovation in the near future, and therefore company file structure best practice.
Zonal OCR allows users to make certain metadata mandatory by checking what is required in a document or piece of content, such as a name, phone number, etc. Without this functionality, each time someone uploads content or files to the DMS, the stored information runs a high risk of being named arbitrarily by its creator.
Although a full text search is most useful for interpreting and retrieving metadata-driven information, simple search options are also necessary for any DMS system, and it is preferable that both these content and email search types can be completed from the same window, giving users search inter-operability to expedite the business process and company file structure best practice in general.
Additionally, as both these search types unfold, the central search box should filter results, helping workers further hone the data, content, or information they are seeking.
Adjustable Zonal OCR, albeit a feature native to Document Management Software, has seen its purpose clarified by DMS vendors’ use of it in simpler, streamlined DMS interfaces. If you want to automate menial file and folder structure tasks, Zonal OCR is perfect.
The Importance of Extended Components
These can include anything from natural language processors to certain integration capabilities within specific CRM solutions. However, many DMS vendors go so far as to deem the mobile medium to be an “extended component” of DMS.
However, the functionality within mobile solutions has improved so much with some vendors that it should be housed in the same suite as on-premise and cloud-based online DMS mediums.
Social Content Management
Content has become synonymous with organizations’ social presence on the web, particularly as it pertains to sharing. This entails a milieu of features that comprise up to one-fourth of the average DMS vendor offerings—providing the means to extract insight from social content on the web.
However, each of these distinct features should have some degree of templating features—allowing users to create a signature template that caters more to each organization’s branding and graphic design specifications. Ensuring company file structure best practice mandates proper use of social content management.
Social Content and Collaboration
Roughly 20% of an DMS is comprised of social content and collaboration features. Although there is no generic term to specify the features comprising social content and collaboration on DMS platforms, all of them offer support for projects, messaging, communication, and task completion across all stages of the business process.