AIIM Conference and Expo 2008 held in Boston on March 3-6 2008. Go to www.aiimexpo.com for more info. DBX will be there.

There’s a misconception in many organizations that implementing a collaboration solution simply entails installing new technology that allows departments and teams to share calendars and send instant messages. While collaboration technology certainly provides these capabilities and many others, an organization should also review areas such as business processes, team cultures, and change management. Here are 5 questions to consider when considering implementing a collaboration solution. Which aspects of its operations should a company examine in determining whether or not it is ready to implement a collaboration solution? What types of collaboration technologies are available today? How can collaboration help enterprises? What ROI can a company expect from implementing a collaboration solution? What challenges or problem areas are companies likely to face when implementing a collaboration solution?

What is "Scan ready?" This means the paper document is prepared to be applied to the scanning equipment. The pages must be sans staples, wrinkles, and tears.

Safety Tip of the Week !! Always read a web site's privacy policy before giving any personal information. Also make sure that a web site offers a secure connection before giving credit-card information. _____________________________________ Special Offers PHOTO Scanning Service Get up to 1000 Photos Scanned to CD for $50. Start saving those memories before they fade away. 10% OFF ALL Document Services Now until the end of the year, enjoy another 10% discount on all document services from DBX.

 

Documents — whether paper or digital — constitute the fastest growing component of most organizations' information assets. U.S. businesses create more new electronic content each year than all the materials currently contained in the Library of Congress.

If you realize the importance of managing those assets better, on-demand may be a more effective and lower cost alternative to installed software. But is it right for you?

The paradox is that while you want more control, you don’t want to impede the flow of good information to those who need access to it. How do you accomplish both? How do you manage the explosion in content and resolve all of its associated problems?

The Problems that Plague You

Outdated Information. You want your field organization and customers to have the latest and most relevant product and pricing information. Because there is no immediate way to share updated material, field representatives use old information because it’s the information that’s available. As a result, inaccurate pricing and product information goes to the customer. Your organization loses valuable time and business revenue.

Blind Spots. You are still using paper processes in some parts of your company, and these paper processes lead to "information black holes" – documents and other content that are hard to discover, retrieve and manage.

Lack of Access. Your goal is to have geographically dispersed employees, remote workers, distributors, and clients collaborate on projects, contributing information and reviewing that which is created among team members. Projects include: preparing proposals, sharing competitive information, resolving billing disputes, repurposing marketing materials, and much more. Relying on specialized remote access software (e.g. VPN), however, that is not usable on every company’s network may mean someone is out of the loop. Your goal is at risk of being realized.

Wasted Time. You send a document by e-mail for several people to review; each edits the document resulting in several uncoordinated yet edited versions. Your company spends time you don’t have to reconcile the pieces.

Technology Roadblocks. You send out an e-mail only to have it rejected by the receiving party’s system as being too large. The data is critical, but cannot be delivered either because the message itself is too large or the user’s inbox is full (of other large e-mails and attachments?). Your project is delayed and time spent working around this limitation is a drag on productivity and a distraction from higher-value tasks.

Article furnished by AIIM – The ECM Association

 

DBX will be at the AIIM Conference and Expo.

The AIIM International Conference and Expo will be held in Boston MA, March 3-6 and DBX will be presenting a learning session on how to successfully implement a Document Management System. Brian Scott from Spotsylvania County and David Noel from Stafford County will be attending and assisting in the session.

 

The DBX DataVault is NOW using the GOOGLE Desktop

 With the advent of the GOOGLE Desktop, the DBX DataVault can now be utilized much more efficiently. Faster content searching, Faster document retrieval.  With so many types of paper and documents, its difficult to sort and organize them into something meaningful for you personal filing or your business. Your not sure how to organize or much less have the time. Now with the GOOGLE Desktop indexing feature, DBX can get your paper instantly searchable without the headaches of organizing and sorting through paper.

 The GOOGLE Desktop is a free application that runs on your computer and automatically indexes all of your content. Content being email, text files, Word Docs, Excel Spreadsheets, PDF Documents, etc. It has the same look and feel as if you went to www.Google.com.

 

 

Data Backup

Remember to always keep a backup copy of all digital data in a safe place away from your primary copy for daily use.  Data can be retrieved from damaged CDs and hard drives, but it is costly and not always effective.  A spare CD in a lockbox can save the day!

 

 

The GOOGLE Desktop 

The GOOGLE Desktop is a sweet piece of software the runs on your computer. It’s so sweet that we decided to start using it for our DataVault Personal and ONLINE products. This software runs constantly on your desktop indexing all of you files. Whether it is Word docs, Excel Sheets, Email, text files, or PDF documents, the GOOGLE Desktop will index them. What does all this mean? When your looking for that document you wrote a couple of years ago but cannot remember where you stored it, you simply fire up the GOOGLE desktop and enter some text that you’re looking for. It works just like the GOOGLE on the internet. The software will search through its index file finding any document that contains that content and present you with links to the documents. How easy is that? The best part is that this software is FREE and you never notice it running on your computer.

Now what we have done is implement this software with our DataVault PERSONAL and ONLINE offering. What we do is scan your documents and OCR them on the spot. The OCR provides the searchable text that the GOOGLE desktop needs. When we drop the OCR images on the computer, the desktop will index them based on the OCR text. This can eliminate the necessity of organizing content before it reaches your scanning service bureau because the GOOGLE desktop will find that information for you. Now to really get organized, of course an indexing structure will go nicely with this as well.