What should be scanned and kept as record? This is the question facing many companies as they look for ways to move forward within the EDMS or move away from paper. Here’s the basic place to start:

• Decide how far back to go when scanning (recommend you go back 10 years)
• Bank statements, payroll, insurance certificates and HR documents are a no brainer
• Decide what records you NEED to keep vs what you would like to keep
• Pick a high volume scanner
• Make sure scanner can scan to open or search-able PDF…not an image or TIFF

I would recommend sitting down with your Attorney for a review of what documents her or she would like to see you keep. After that meeting you and your company need to establish a document retention policy and have that available for review by your auditors.

Sorry to our loyal readers, we have been adding new community members at a vigorous pace. Because of this workload, I haven’t been able to keep up on my duties in the Blog.

I have great news to share. We now have over 500 community members in 8 countries. This is amazing! We are starting an on-line collaboration revolution. I am proud to say our community to reducing waste, becoming more efficient and growing weekly. How’s that for carbon footprint reduction?

Tip of the day: Dump Vista, pay the $99 to downgrade to XP. Don’t even look at Windows 7…eek!

Looking for a EDMS? When looking at potential vendors, you must ask each vendor about their ability to secure your documents. Most offer easily customizable settings for groups and users to secure documents by type, location or view. Some of the more robust systems off the ability to restrict view of documents within a secure folder, non-print of documents (while still having fun viewing rights), and non-search of confidential documents.

Make each vendor explain how they apply security to each document, folder and overall repository. Do they offer encryption? What is the security policy for outside collaborators? These questions and the demonstrable answers are paramount to deploying a secure and stable Electronic Document Management System.

When looking for a EDMS, ask if it will allow document tags. Document tags are a nice way to add another quick layer of organization to your repository. Most systems will allow some level of document tags, but few will offer easy and customizable tags on the fly.

When you’re looking for a EDMS, ask the vendor if they can offer multi location document review. Basically, can one person in NYC look at a document while someone on Miami looks at the same document? Some say they can, but few offer this collaborative tool.

Sounds like a key to collaboration to me!

So you’ve decided to look at document management solutions. You’ve done your homework and decided to pursue the ASP model as it makes sense for your company.

After looking at all of the products in the market, you are impressed with the overall functionality and cost associated with each product. Each offers robust document management within a unique user interface. Each promises access from anywhere at anytime as long as you have an internet connection. However, one requires a software (or thin client) download for users to access the repository and the other doesn’t.

Which would your buy?

a) the product that allows users to access the document repository through a user interface validated by a piece of software resident on the users machine?
b) the product that allows users to access the document repository via an internet browser with encryption from any PC or MAC anywhere at anytime?

I choose B…I want my documents anywhere at anytime from any machine I choose. I don’t want to drag my computer with me where ever I go!

How do you send confidential documents? Courier? e-mail?

I would bet most of our non-member readers send confidential documents via email to their peers on a daily basis. That is a scary thought. Your proprietary data floating around the internet from e-mail server to e-mail server.

Our members never send confidential documents, they invite their peers to view the docs throught our secure portal. Now that’s more like it!

From a letter we recently received:

“When we started with cor2, we started for a very specific reasons. We needed a highly secure way to send data for claims back and forth between multiple parties. While we had our own ftp site, our clients found it to be slow and we questioned the security.

James Masterson – Hamilton

Where will we be in 3 years within our community? At our current growth rate, we should eclipse 1000 users located in 20+ countries. Each of these companies and users will have unique business needs and its is our job to make sure we can meet those needs.

For the next 3 weeks, we will be contacting each of our community members and meeting with selected clients to gather ideas and needs for the road map of The COR and COR Share. Using this information, we will be able to plan and execute product enhancements, develop new technology and meet the growing needs of all our clients.

Please be on the watch for your e-survey.

Bad investments – $2 Trillion
Failing company – $500 Billion
Government bailout – $180 Billion (so far)
Working at AIG and receiving bonus paid by the American tax base – Priceless

Everyone together…High Five!