Records Management and Document Management: The same thing?

The ECM world is plagued with abbreviations, concepts and terms whose limits seem to be extraordinarily confusing. Every day, we talk more and more about records management, but few people really know what that term refers to and how it’s different from document management. We’re going to try to sort out the confusion by explaining two fundamental aspects that make them different.

“Records” and “documents” aren’t the same thing.

A document can be a record; but not all documents are records. “Records” talk about the management and the activity of the business, which means that they’re normally subject to law, whether it be for their conservation, their format, or prohibitions against changing content once they’ve been created.

Not all document management software can help you with your records. Document management software is normally more concerned with permitting access and recovering documents that are in a digital format by multiple users. This software usually allows for collaborative work with documents; but not all software can guarantee special treatment for documents that are related to taxes, employees, contracts or anything else that might need special treatment.

Success Case: Discover how the aeronautic CRISA increased document control with Athento

We explain how Athento helped Crisa manage technical documents.

Sharepoint: “We can't live with or without you”

Today, we’d like to share our comments on this incredible CMS Wire post (“SharePoint Love So Big, EMC Documentum Cuddles Up Too”) with you.

Basically, in that post, one idea comes across: SharePoint gains more than seven million users every year. If you’re in the same business, you’re either with them or against them, but you can’t be indifferent to them.

Within that post there are some examples of the strategy of other players regarding SharePoint, summing up sentences from their executives or ad campaigns. Every player has taken a position in this love-hate relationship. Within the CMS Wire post, some comments are repproduced regarding SharePoint- Not very flattering-. Those comments were made three or four years ago. Today, the landscape has changed a bit. If you can’t beat ‘em, learn to live with ‘em. Other suppliers, such as EMC, pretty much know what they want to do. This year, EMC has launched a new connector for SharePoint, which allows users to use Documentum as a repository while the users enjoy the SharePoint interface which is already very familiar to them.

…and Athento?

We started working with Nuxeo, considering it an option for many businesses that couldn’ (or didn’t want to) take on all the restrictions which using SharePoint imposes. Years later, we started working with Alfresco, and we found that it was also an option for businesses which placed importance both on collaboration and Enterprise Content Management, but who didn’t want to go with SharePoint. What really changed our minds, however, was the appearance of CMIS, because the standard allowed us to dedicate ourselves to our area: “intelligence” without having to compete with suppliers who are extraordinarily talented at what they do – each with their good points and bad points, being able to bring what those players either couldn’t (or wouldn’t) do, because their strengths weren’t quite as strong. These days, Athento can help Documentum users, just as it does Nuxeo users, and, actually, our capture application can be totally integrated with SharePoint. 

The lesson here is that you can’t tell users what to use, just like you can’t choose for them. You can recommend what you think is best for the client, but at the end of the day, your work is to give the clients what they need, and what others can’t give them.

Intelligent Document Management white paper

Discover how Intelligent Document Management can help businesses and governments.

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Document Capture: Going beyond paper

We traditionally relate document capture with digitalization; the reality is that document capture is a much more complex dimension within the ECM cycle. Capturing documents means putting them in a repository in a digital version, whether or not they originally come from a paper document.

Aside from paper, what other things could be captured digitally?

• E-mails: The sensitivity of information contained in e-mails forces businesses to store that information, either in document format, or as records. It’s also common these days that document flows coming from outside the company, and which are sent as attached data within e-mails, are captured by ECM software.


• Faxes: You can avoid an intermediate step of digitalization with documents received by fax if you connect the fax to the document management system.


• Content flow on social media: This is one of the aspects of capture that is least thought about. Nonetheless, with the rise of social networks, and the value that brands get from concepts like “reputation management”, it’s fairly likely that we’ll soon see a rise in the capture functions which look to document information handled by companies in their social network profiles.

White paper: Digitalization and Smart Capture of Documents

Discover how a smart document capture process works.

Document Capture with SharePoint

Document capture continues to be one of the issues that has yet to be resolved in the ECM and document management world in general. That’s even more so with SharePoint. 

It goes without saying that the majority of solutions regarding capture for SharePoint require a huge investment – we’re talking about licenses that can run as high as €60,000 in the first year (and more than 20% of that goes towards annual support).

Although the main solutions offer connectors for SharePoint, that doesn’t mean that you can avoid many, many parameterizations and that there aren’t significant limitation at the level of the technology environment to get software that works with this platform. 

It’s also worth considering that many solutions have equated document capture to the simple process of scanning paper documents, leaving aside the capture of electronic documents, which isn’t any less important. The management of e-mails, faxes and other electronic flows is of vital importance for an integral document capture process. With Athento Capture, we resolve those difficulties described above for those SharePoint users who need a complete solution for document capture.

What can Athento Capture for SharePoint do for you?

• Capture of e-mails and faxes Connect to scanners using the TWAIN protocol.
• Scan documents from the platform.
• Mass loading of electronic documents contained in local machines.
• Scanning batches of documents which can be separated into individual documents.
• Recognition of QR codes.
• Extraction of metadata.
• Exporting of metadata to other systems.
• Automatic recognition and classification of documents.
• Manual validation of extracted metadata.
• Users can configure templates that are used for data extraction in structured documents.
• Indexing document content Support for certified capture.
• Support for distributed capture.

White paper: Digitalization and Smart Capture of Documents

Discover how a smart document capture process works.

Why is it so difficult to get users to use the document management software?

Experts in documentation usually complain about the people they say are “resistant to change” when it comes time for employees of a business (which didn’t have a document management system (DMS) or ECM platform before) to become users of such a system.

The traditional reason why the users feel apprehension towards the new system tends to be the interface or other characteristics which the workers feel are “hardly practical.”

If there can be various reasons why the new system is barely used, there’s one reason that no one is talking about, and which, in my opinion, is the most powerful reason why the document management system’s not being used: the users simply don’t see the benefits when they do put documents into the system.

To them, sending documents by e-mail seems a lot easier than sharing them via the DMS ;  it involves less effort to stick a file in a filing cabinet than to digitalize it; it seems a lot easier to save things in shared folders than to upload the things to a document management software.

We can get beyond those “pains in the neck” issues that employees face with a specific solution: for example, by synchronizing it with WebDAV or a file server, in case there’s a strong tendency to rely on shared folders. Before that, the first thing to do is to convince the users that feeding the system really is worth the trouble and the real value lies in the accessibility of the information.

How can you make them see the value? 

You can show them that using the DMS can be the solution if they answer “yes” to any of the following questions: 

• Have you ever had trouble trying to find a document that you received (or sent) via e-mail? 
• Have you ever been unable to find a document that you thought you had stored on your PC?
• Do you frequently have to refer back to (or use) documentation you haven’t used in a very long time? 
• Is it difficult to remember which version is the last version that you, as a group, have been working on?

You can ask them a lot of similar questions, but the key is to understand – and to make them understand – that, any time they want (or need) to recover information, it’s far easier to work with a document or content management system. For most people, filing actual paper documents ends up being a lot easier than doing it digitally and it’s not easy for them to see the benefits of “filing for filing’s sake”.

Let’s not forget that the final reason for getting an ECM system or document management system is to make the day-to-day work of working with the user’s documents easier. We providers of ECM software should continue to work to make applications easier to use and closer to how people actually work. Similarly, IT managers and document experts need to make an effort to make employees understand the benefits they can get from working every day with the manager.

The ROI of my Digitalization Project white paper

Discover how to calculate the ROI of a paper document capture process.

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Comparing ECM Systems (including Alfresco, OpenText, Documentum, Filenet, Sharepoint or Nuxeo).

How to install and configure WebDav for Nuxeo in Windows

Last week we learned how to install and configure WebDAv when using Linux systems. Today, we'll explain the same for Windows users (Windows 7 and 8).

Let's start by going to the Computer window:

Click on the Map Network Drive. Once you have done this, the following window appears:

Parameters:

• Drive: Just choose a letter to identify your Nuxeo repository. 
• Folder: Nuxeo url.

Make sure the boxes below are selected as shown in the image above:

• Select Reconnect at sign-in in order to mount this unit every time you turn on your computer. 
• Unselect Connect using different credentials in order to be asked for credentials. 

Now, you must identify yourself by using your Nuxeo user data.If your credentials are correct, in the Computer view, a new unit will appear, which corresponds to the new connection to Nuxeo using WebDAV.

For further information visit our documentation center.