Save money – the two keywords that every businessman/woman wants to hear. One way businesses can save money is the idea of Content Management. Content Management is exactly what it sounds like: procedures and automation designed to help businesses and other organizations manage their content more effectively. A content management system (CMS) can be as simple as a file folder on a desktop or as complex as your organization’s SQL database. Every company that has any kind of data (which is all of them) should, at a minimum, invest a few hours to understand and structure their data. Here are five ways a good CMS can help your business realize efficiencies:
1. Reduce Time To Find Information
How often have you gone to look for a document in your organization’s shared drive and dug ten, twenty levels deep in folders? If you multiply that time across every person in your organization, and then apply their hourly rate to it. you can see why being able to find information quickly can help improve your bottom line. A good CMS will utilize your organization’s “folksonomy,” or how your employees phrase the different areas of your business. When searching, your employees will be able to use recognizable terms to find exactly what they’re looking for—quickly.
2. Reduce your storage requirements
Recalling back to your organization’s file folder system, how often does the same file get duplicated across multiple folders? When an organization has a robust content management plan—”a place for everything and everything in its place”—then users know where to look for to find a particular document. Ergo, they’re less likely to upload a document into the wrong folder and lose it in oblivion. Automating your content management through a program like SharePoint will help this process as well.
3. Facilitate Better Team Communication
Even when your team sits within feet of each other, information silos can still exist. Users may opt to leave things on their desktop, which becomes a problem when that person is out of the office. Using a robust content management system, teams can keep their documents in a shared environment.
4. Records Management
For businesses that must keep data for legal reasons (such as government and health care agencies), keeping records can be a burden. In the US Government, some documents must be kept for up to seven years after they’ve been signed. Usually, this means that collaboration spaces become clogged with archived information, and storage becomes a concern. But with a content management system in place, you can automate the movement of records from your collaboration spaces to your records management solution. And in some cases, the system can automatically purge documents your organization no longer needs.
5. Automation Keeps Things Moving
While a file folder system and a robust content management plan can serve as an apt content management solution, many businesses find the inclusion of a third party software to be beneficial. Working with a consulting company like eSoftware, additional features can be utilized, like workflows, automation, and metadata, to help your company realize its content management potential.
At eSoftware, we can help boost your productivity, help you save money, become more efficient and see all the Microsoft 365 platforms have to offer and the benefits of a content management system. Call us today or click here to set up your free consultation! 1-800-682-0882