Our clients are always asking, “How do we implement our new DMS?” Our answer is that every company is different. Some will have only paper documents, some have paper and digital documents, and still others are already digital and need to move from one system to another. There are some similarities in these, and we will cover these from top to bottom to help in setting up your personal DMS implementation. The 8 items are listed below and will be covered in as much detail as possible following the list, using eFileCabinet as the target DMS.
- Plan how you are going to use the new system.
- Do you want a Cloud solution or a local solution?
- Plan how you are going to transition to the new system.
- Train the staff that will administer the new DMS.
- Stop growing the current system (paper or digital).
- Setup any templates, profiles, and workflows you need.
- Transition needed data from the current system to your new DMS.
- Train your support staff on the new DMS.
- Optional: Move residual data to the new DMS.
Establishing Your Needs
How are you going to utilize eFileCabinet? Are you just storing data in the hopes of not having to find it later? Are you storing the data and wanting to find it easily? Do you need templates (frequently replicated folder structure), profiles (metadata to help with searches), or workflows for documents? eFileCabinet can provide documents to help you design the data layout and naming in the new DMS. eFileCabinet can also provide additional documents on permissions, and profile creation to help aid when searching for files and data in the new DMS. Now that you know how you plan to use the new DMS, it is time to decide if the Cloud or a local solution is what you need.
Choosing a Solution
Choosing what solution you need is a very important step in your DMS implementation. Select the solution that meets your company’s needs based on your security policies, practices, and requirements. The great thing about choosing eFileCabinet as your DMS is that we offer both desktop and online solutions. Both solutions utilize 256-bit AES encryption of the data in transit and at rest, have role-based permissions and security, profiles, templates, and workflow.
Online allows the admin to limit what IP addresses can access the application, and what times users can log on. The local solution integrates with Microsoft Active Directory. While both local and Cloud solutions allow access to data via an Android or iOS application, the Cloud solution allows full access to the files while maintaining role-based security. Once you have this conundrum solved, it is time to think about the transition process.
Transitioning Your System
Transitioning from your current system to eFileCabinet’s DMS is a simple process that will make or break your implementation. Are you going to move none, some, or all of your current data to eFileCabinet? Do you have structure you wish to maintain or is a new structure being implemented? You likely have previously put thought into how you wish to have the data organized and accessed. If you have the structure in Windows already, eFileCabinet will import it as it sits directly into the application.
If it is in another system, eFileCabinet will offer to export the data to Windows while keeping the structure and naming as an additional service, even if it is file by file. This data is then imported and added to the eFileCabinet DMS using a remote session with our professional implementation engineers. The last part of planning the transition is to schedule the implementation date with eFileCabinet. Now that the transition to the new DMS is planned, you need to train the staff that will be administering the software.
Training Users and Admins
Training your software admins and the standard users can be done simultaneously or separately. eFileCabinet provides a few training options. The first is our standard webinar trainings. These are one hour long and cover everything from basic usage to administration. This is perfect for smaller businesses or groups that just need to know how it works in general. As an additional service, we offer individualized, company-specific trainings. These, too, are an hour in length, but they are held with your company alone and can be provided in basic or advanced levels.
Lastly, eFileCabinet offers a white-glove onsite service where we come to your office location to train and help setup the application. The onsite technician gets to know your company flow and needs, and trains using your company’s eFileCabinet environment. This eliminates confusion with your employees and allows for modification of processes to meet the needs of your company. It also allows your admins and users the ability to start creating the templates, profiles, and workflows that are needed as the data is imported into the new system. Now it is time to start your final phases of the transition.
Final Transition
The final phases of the transition start with stopping the flow of data to the old system. This typically means that we start printing the files digitally or save directly to eFileCabinet. Doing this will start growing eFileCabinet and stop the growth of the old system. Once the growth is stopped, you can then import the data into the new eFileCabinet DMS without worry of any data being lost. If you have additional residual data, this can be imported as it is accessed or not at all, depending on your company’s plan for this data.
We the hope of that the direction and tools provided in this article are helpful in transitioning to new DMS like eFileCabinet.