At most professional services firms, people still use file shares and email to store and share their documents.
But unless you’re using today’s collaboration solutions for document sharing, you and your employees have to constantly check to make sure that you’re working with the right version. This constant review and validation results in lost time and productivity and additional risks.
A file share is often specific to a department, team or process. In it, you’ll see multiple versions of the same document, which are typically managed though a file naming convention, such as ending the file name with “v1,” “v2” and so forth. As the process continues, the version number gets higher.
While file shares are an improvement over people saving documents on their own desktops, they don’t help you maintain the correct and accurate control over copy at any given point in time. This often results in embarrassing errors, wasted time and — especially when you’re handling confidential information — increased risks.
Here are four problems that professional services firms could encounter due to an outdated document sharing process:
- Difficulty finding the latest version of a document: When using a file share, you’re constantly browsing through folders to locate the latest version of a document, either by looking for the highest version number or the most recent “last modified” date.But the version number doesn’t always agree with the date metadata, and that’s where mistakes start to creep in. In a file share, there’s no automatic way to sync the files, so there’s always a risk of choosing the wrong file to edit or sending it off to a client.
- No sure way to track changes and document history: Document edits and comments are often a part of the editorial process an organization has to publish work products going out the door. These changes are often made in context with the document or approval process, and need to be kept track of. Version numbers, edits and comments can add a large number of versions saved for a particular document, and referencing where changes were made and by whom can get complicated. While the lack of a clear document history might seem like a small issue, spending an hour marking up the wrong file is often an hour wasted.
- Routing undermines document authority: Once you start circulating a document via email or another channel, it undermines the authority of the documents in the file share. Every time you attach a document to an email, you’re creating another digital copy and putting it into circulation. It’s harder and harder to be confident that the latest version is making it back to the file share.
- Clients and partners lack access to your document sharing mechanism: If multiple versions create inefficiencies when collaborating internally, that problem becomes much more serious when working with partners and clients external to your organization. With coworkers, you have a reasonable expectation that they’re saving new document versions in the file share. But a partner or client is typically outside your network, and doesn’t have access to your internal mechanism for document sharing.
Soon, you start sharing documents with them via email or cloud-hosted tools, such as Dropbox. Almost immediately, you could have untold additional copies of that document circulating outside your network, and you have no control point with your source document, which should in theory reside in your file share.
Taking Control With Versioning
Unlike a file share, today’s online collaboration tools typically offer version control capabilities that alleviate these problems. You could think of version control as ensuring that the master copy (or control copy) of your document is accurate and up-to-date, and that all of the feedback and input from others involved in its creation has been collected and added to that master copy.
With version control, you have the option to restore any previous version of the document. This is often quite helpful. Sometimes you’ll make a major change in a document, then decide after review that the new direction isn’t working. Collaboration software stacks all of the earlier versions within the same document so that you have one single reference point for all iterations.
Since the system is automatically maintaining that control copy at any given point in time, it’s far easier and faster for people to find what they need and share documents. The savings in time and resources eventually translate into dollars, perhaps in the form of more billable hours, more service-level calls or other productivity gains.
Legal or financial firms in particular generate documents at a rapid pace, and the direction and sensitivity of that content often changes. Collaboration systems help the institution to control the physical location of a document and who has access to it, making it possible to collaborate with partners and clients without exposing confidential information to anyone else in the firm who lacks access.
In the end, adopting today’s collaboration solutions for document sharing increases security for professional services firms while allowing these firms to be more efficient with internal collaboration and more nimble when working with clients and partners.
Learn more about choosing the best online collaboration tools for your organization by contacting Portal Solutions
