Document management is important for many companies that are looking for an ordered system of
centralising information. Effective planning around your document management policy will ensure that document types are defined, created and classified so make retrieval quick and simple.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports your organization's document management needs by providing a broad set of document management capabilities that enable you to do the following:
- Store, organize, and locate documents.
- Ensure the consistency of documents
- Manage metadata for documents
- Help protect documents from unauthorized access or use
- Ensure consistent business processes (workflows) for how documents are handled
Contact us for more information on SharePoint Document Management.
The site templates included with SharePoint can be used to build sites that are optimised for creating, using, and storing large numbers of documents. Sites that are created from these templates have purpose built document management features such as required check-out and major-and-minor document versioning, which are turned on by default. Required check-out helps prevent conflicts and confusion over changes, because only one user can change a file at a given time. Versioning allows you to track changes to documents, and it helps you manage content as you revise it. Versioning is especially helpful when several people work together on projects, or when information goes through several stages of development and review.
SharePoint enables you to protect files in several ways. Information Rights Management (IRM) will allow an administrator to limit the actions that can be applied to a document or a whole set of documents. If you want to prevent people from reading drafts of documents in progress, you can set up a document library with major and minor versioning and then specify which groups of people are allowed to read minor versions (drafts).
Another way you can help protect documents is by configuring permissions for individual folders, list items, or documents. If there are only one or two files in a document library to which you want to restrict access, you can edit the permissions for these individual items to change who has the permission to view or edit them.
You can also manage document creation through document approval workflows. Your document may need to be edited or approved before it can be published. It may also be the case that you are just a contributor to a document that will then go on for further contribution from another user. Setting up a workflow process will allow these process to occur to ensure documents are not published without the correct contributions or approvals being made.
Contact us to find out more about document management and workflow.