Collaboration

---

Collaborating on documents is an important task in many organizations. With DMS you are able to collaborate more effectively and efficiently while reducing or eliminating the chances of losing any changes.

How do we do this?

• Central Repository for Documents
• Document Check-Out and Check-In
• Document Versioning
• Document History
• Automatic Alerts

What you may be doing today
In your current environment, collaborating on documents can be difficult to manage, especially if it involves more than two people or if the collaborators reside in multiple locations.

• The original author creates and saves a document
• The creator then e-mails the document to the collaborators
• Each collaborator makes changes at the same time and e-mails the changed document to the group
• The creator reacts to the comments received by e-mail, e-mails a revised document and the cycle starts again
• This cycle may repeat itself several times

This method of collaboration can lead to a number of problems

• Changes get lost
• No version control
• Too many emails

The DMS approach is better

• After the author creates the document, he or she saves it in a DMS folder
• Rather than sending an e-mail with the document, the author uses the "Send Notice" button in DMS to alert collaborators that the document is available for review
• If a collaborator wants to make changes, he or she uses DMS to Check-Out the document, the other collaborators cannot make changes to the document until the person who checked it out uses DMS to Check-In the document
• DMS automatically creates new versions of a document when they are checked in, which gives collaborators the ability to go back to a prior version
• DMS makes collaborations easy because any collaborator has access to a document from any computer with an Internet connection anywhere, anytime