How to pick an ECM for our business?

June 18, 2021

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If we talk about strategic plans and trends when it comes to becoming a cutting-edge organization, we must not neglect the in-depth evaluation of the digital transformation to which more and more companies join daily. At Rootstack, we are aware of the needs of our customers and always evaluating new solutions that satisfy and support innovation, we want to show them the essential characteristics that must be evaluated to choose an ECM solution: **Characteristics** **Essentials** - Collaboration: A repository of documents should allow documents to be retrieved and managed by authorized users. Must be able to assign roles and access profiles for documents and offer multiple query options. Other advanced forms of collaboration allow multiple users to view and modify (digital ink) a document simultaneously in a collaborative session. The resulting document must be visible in its final form, at the same time as the storage of the marks made by each individual user during the collaboration session. - Version control: you must have a process through which documents are checked in the repository, in order to allow users to recover previous versions and continue the work from a selected point. Having version control is useful for documents that change over time and require updating, and also allows users to view previous reference versions. - Search and consultation: Various options to locate documents and be able to consult them effectively - Security: This refers to the ability of a particular document repository to encrypt information transferred or stored through the Internet for workflow or collaboration purposes. **Digitization and capture automation** The options for document capture are considered in order to pass them from the physical state to the digital one, counting with indexing and massive loading of documents. **Workflows** Currently, workflows have a wide range of targets and some document repositories have an integrated workflow module. These workflows can be: manual, requires a user for document visualization and decides who to send or how it works, allows an administrator to create a rule that dictates the flow of the document through an organization. For example, an invoice goes through an approval process and then it is routed to the department of debts to pay. Dynamic rules allow branches that are created in a workflow process. An example of the above is that a quantity of the system is followed by different routes through the organization. **Platforms, Development and Integration** These are the characteristics that integrate the integration capabilities of document repositories. Once the information is centralized, it is feasible to integrate with other users for which users can consult the documents from the repository, such as changing and saving the modified document in the repository as a new version, all without leaving the application. This integration is available for email or collaboration software. Integration with open standards such as ODMA, LDAP, WebDAV, and SOAP to allow integration with other software and compliance with internal controls. Once we know the characteristics of the ECM we must identify the need of the company and to fill a comparison matrix where we have the different solutions that exist today in the market such as: - Outdoor - Docuware - M-file - DocuShare The idea is that before implementing an ECM solution it is possible to evaluate the different solutions and comparisons at a functional, technical and economic level, in order to implement the solution that best suits our needs.