Document Management

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Whether the business you work in is large or small, document management is crucial to ensuring that you have the documents you need when you need them. In the past, manual fi ling systems were easy to understand and to use and things that weren't fi led had a tendency to make themselves very obvious - big stacks of unorganised papers can't be hidden easily. On the fl ip side, it's easy to hide folders of unorganized documents on the computer - but it's no less reprehensible a scenario. Good document management skills can save you hours of work a week.

Typically a document management system will be applied using in-house rules and protocols. These will include a system for naming and storing documents on the computer system and instructions for managing the situation where a storage location is full and documents need to be archived or deleted.

Hand-in-hand with protocols for storing documents are protocols for retrieving them easily and quickly when you need to. Part of this retrieval process is based on the fi le name that you have provided for the document and the location it should be stored in.

But too often, everything goes awry and a fi le can't be found.

Having a plan for backing up and archiving documents is a key factor in document management. You should have a system for making backups or duplicates of your fi les so they can be recovered in the case of a computer crash or natural disaster. If these documents contain sensitive or private information then backups as well as the original fi les should be held secure against intruders. Another feature of a document management system is a process for working collaboratively on documents and making the documents available to others who need access to them.

Microsoft Offi ce has tools that can help you in your document management tasks. Tools like Microsoft Offi ce Document Scanning and Document Imaging let you scan documents into the MDI fi le format which can be viewed using Microsoft Offi ce Document Imaging. From here the documents can be annotated and printed or faxed. Find these applications by choosing Start, All Programs, Microsoft Offi ce, Microsoft Offi ce Tools and then select either Microsoft Offi ce Document Scanning or Microsoft Offi ce Document Imaging. The programs are interlinked so you can scan a document using the scanning tool and open the resulting document in the document imaging tool and you can scan a page into an imaging document by clicking the Scan New Document tool.

In Microsoft Word you can make it easier to save documents to, for example, a network directory by specifying this as the program default. To do this, choose Tools, Options, File Locations and set a location for documents to be saved. Using a network folder ensures the documents will be backed up when the network is backed up.

Where you have lost a fi le, avoid wasting time looking for it yourself and have Microsoft Word do the work for you. Choose File, File Search to open the basic fi le search dialog and type some search text and specify a location and a type of fi le that you are looking for. Word will then look for the fi le for you. If you click the Advanced File Search link you can write more detailed search criteria for the fi le and fi nd it by using information contained in it like a client name or a phrase.

When you've lost an email, Microsoft Outlook 2007 can come to the rescue. It makes use of the Windows Vista search tool or, if you're using Microsoft Windows XP, you can download and install the desktop search tool (http://tinyurl.com/yb879x) to make fi nding information in Outlook emails easy. Even Microsoft Outlook 2003 contains a serviceable tool for locating missing emails and anyone can use the Microsoft Desktop Search to fi nd not only emails but also Word documents and Excel worksheets.

TEAM WORK WITH OFFICE
When you work with others it's important to control who changes what in a document and how those changes are managed. This can be done from within Microsoft Word and Excel. You can set Word to track changes to a document by choosing Tools, Track Changes and every change made to the document will be recorded and can be displayed or hidden.

Use the track changes feature to track changes to a document over time and to manage documents that the lots of people contribute to. When you're ready to settle the document you can accept or reject each change individually or as a group - so deleted text can be permanently removed and inserted text permanently inserted into the document.

Another aspect of document management is saving different versions of the same document as they are created. In Word you can store different versions of the one document all within the one fi le and, if desired, you can return to an earlier version of the document.

To do this in Word, choose File, Versions and save the current version of the document my clicking Save Now. You can also confi gure the tool so you automatically save a new version on closing the document. While document version results in larger documents it's a handy way to maintain a history of changes to a document and it lets you return to an earlier version of a document if you need to.

While a large scale document management systems can provide support for some or all of these functions you'll fi nd that even at an individual level it's possible to create a document management system that can grow with your needs and the size of your organization. We can all benefi t from paying attention to basics like naming fi les, creating sensible directory structures, and taking precautions against loss by backing up.

To ensure that we have copies of our documents in the future, pay attention to archiving fi les to disk and indexing these with their contents.