Web-based document sync allows organizations to maintain a strong enterprise collaboration strategy while acknowledging the reality of today’s mobile workforce. At some point, nearly everyone works remotely for a time, and whether you work from home, the office or the road, maintaining document management is always important. How do you ensure documents are stored and maintained properly when people are always on the move and working from different locations?
If cloud-based file storage and content management is an option for your organization, web-based document sync is a great way to maintain documents as a single source of truth, while supporting a collaboration strategy that reflects the reality of the business world today.
Here’s how web-based document sync works: Let’s say you’ve uploaded a document to your SharePoint site and document library. You’re planning to travel for a couple of days and can’t be sure that you’ll have consistent internet access, so the safe bet is to assume that you’ll be offline for much of the time. Before you leave on your trip, you sync the document to your laptop’s local drive so that you’re able to continue working on it while offline.
At the same time, the web-based sync to SharePoint means that the document is still online and accessible to anyone who may need to refer to it or edit it. If you’ve made your changes offline, you just sync again once you reconnect to the internet, and your changes are applied to the document. Here’s where the collaboration strategy comes into play. If someone else on the team doesn’t like the changes you’ve made and wants to go back to a previous version, they are able to do this easily and quickly by going through the document history and restoring an earlier version. The authoring features also help with keeping track of who made which changes and when.
Whether you work from home or the office, airport terminals or in the field, nearly everyone works remotely at certain times, and maintaining document management is important in those situations. Web-based document sync helps by reducing dependency on having a constant online connection in order to be productive: You have the option to work effectively while offline. At the same time, such a collaboration platform also recognizes the complex ways we work together today: The rest of your team has consistent access to the shared information, and the ability to make their own changes, using technology to reconcile the difference.
In the past, people and organizations tended to resist sharing their work products due to concerns about liability and protecting intellectual property and proprietary business secrets. Now we’re seeing a different paradigm emerge, with notion that documents should be shared across the organization and that there is value in providing this access to the information and knowledge in our work products. In the end, web-based document sync is used to maintain document integrity online while still providing offline content management options.
