In a world of exciting innovation and rapid developments in many new directions, certain technologies have settled into well-beaten paths, paths so long established that they almost feel like they belong to the stone age of the computing world. Word processing fits this mold, where most of us couldn’t identify any advancements over the last fifteen years. Document management follows such a path. Except for a shift towards the Cloud, document management systems picked a route two decades ago, and seemingly every system on the market follows it faithfully.
So we asked the question: Did document management get it right? Are there any different approaches?
We caught up with Jeff Pickard, CEO of FileCenter DMS document management software — a two-decades-strong provider of document management solutions — to ask him about whether the established document management mold meets the actual needs of real-world customers and what the best practices are for identifying and meeting those needs.
In a sentence, how would you describe the typical document management system?
I don’t need a sentence. How about a single word? Database. Almost every document management system I’ve looked at follows the same pattern: a document database geared towards document security. In the last decade, a small evolution in that picture put the database on the Cloud instead of the local server, but that’s the only significant change in two decades. Every other feature in the system is an afterthought to the database.
And in my opinion, this is one area where solution providers, in the long run, completely missed the mark. And continue missing it … year after year.
How did we get here?
In the early days of PCs, file systems were not terribly robust, especially in terms of file-level security. File sharing on a network was also tricky and overly complicated. So the early document management thinkers decided they could add some value by providing better file security and shared access. The most obvious route meant taking the files out of the file system and locking them away in a database where nuanced file security was possible.
Note that I’m not criticizing this approach. At the time, it met a real need. It also came with its drawbacks, of course, but the document management companies elected to take the security-over-utility approach. Nowadays, modern file systems provide more than enough file-level security for most smaller offices, and even many larger ones. Yet document management has never left the security-over-utility path.
You talk about “security over utility”. What “utility” is missing in today’s systems?
Let’s take a digital photo that’s sitting in your “Photos” folder in Windows. What can you do with that photo? The answer is, anything that your Windows environment allows. You can open it with any photo editor you want. You can back it up. You can share it with your choice of Cloud drive. Basically, your possibilities are limited only by your setup. Now put that photo in a proprietary database. What can you do with it? Only what the database explicitly allows.
But the problem is bigger than that. Document management had an opportunity to anticipate the daily tasks of typical office workers — anticipate them and provide tools and features to make these file tasks more streamlined and efficient and, in turn, make the users more productive. Instead, document management focused on security. The result is that modern document management software is almost unnecessarily secure, but it isn’t productive.
Is there a better approach to document management?
“Better” is relative. For some offices, document security is everything. Today’s solutions fit those needs just fine.
But what we’ve discovered over the last two decades is that most offices have relatively simple security needs but deal with tremendous volumes of daily files, volumes that call for better document management tools to streamline the process. Law firms, accountants, and many other industries and everyday businesses suffer under a staggering flow of files. More than security, they need efficiency. In other words, real-world offices need solutions that put the emphasis on utility.
The first and most important step in this direction is a radical departure from every document management system on the market: take the files out of the database and put them back in the Windows file system where they belong. Windows now has excellent file sharing and excellent file and folder-level security. This more than meets the needs of most businesses. And with the files back in the filing system, the door is wide open for a document management system to provide a high level of utility.
That’s exactly what we did with FileCenter DMS. We chose to put the files back in Windows then build the system around the daily tasks of real-world users. And the demand for it has been tremendous.
What are some tasks that FileCenter DMS handles better?
Let’s take two examples: scanning and PDF manipulation.
Where most document management systems provide rudimentary scanning, FileCenter DMS was built around scanning. Why? Because it is a primary task for many users, and it’s a painful one at that. We visited offices. We looked at how users scan. We called for feedback. And we designed scanning tools that eliminate every speed bump we could identify. We now have users who scan multiple documents at a time with just one or two mouse clicks, and end up with automatically-separated files that were intelligently named from information within the document and placed exactly where they belong in the filing structure.
PDF is a similar story. Offices deal with a tremendous volume of PDFs every day. We worked PDF functionality into the core of the interface, making many tasks possible without even opening the PDFs. For instance, our users combine PDFs by just dropping them on each other. They can add comments and annotations without ever leaving the interface. And they can convert most common files to PDF with a mouse click.
That’s what document management looks like when you design your system around utility and efficiency.
What’s something that only FileCenter DMS can do?
Save and open files from any program. That doesn’t seem like a big deal, but think of this: a database-driven system can only integrate with a program if it provides a dedicated add-on. We, on the other hand, have managed a universal integration with theoretically any Windows application, an integration that lets a user save files through the FileCenter DMS interface instead of the Windows interface, speeding up the time it takes to put files in the right place. Ultimately, everything ends up in Windows — where it belongs — but the pathway to organizing those files is greatly accelerated.
But isn’t there a real-world need for Cloud-based document management?
Absolutely. And we feel like most of the document management solutions out there get it wrong — especially the Cloud-based ones.
We find that most users want to maintain that sense of control over their documents. This means keeping the documents local. These users also have their preferred Cloud drives — and the breadth of those opinions would make your head spin.
FileCenter’s approach meets both of these needs perfectly. With all files stored in the native Windows file system, the user can choose any Cloud service they prefer — Google Drive, One Drive, DropBox … you name it. This gives them the sense of control they want, but still meets their remote access and sharing needs.
Cloud-based document management systems aren’t just slow, they’re the most utility-impoverished offerings of the bunch. And local, database-driven document management systems have to rely on their own, home-spun Cloud interfaces.
It sounds like FileCenter DMS is only for smaller offices. Is that true?
Absolutely not. In fact, part of the beauty of moving files back into the filing system is scalability. We have had huge corporations adopt FileCenter DMS for that very reason — they want to manage file access through the native NTFS and domain security they’ve already set up. FileCenter scales up to this kind of setup perfectly. While FileCenter makes a great small business DMS, there’s no limit to the number of users it can support.
How can I get started with FileCenter DMS?
A fully-functional trial version is freely available on our website. And once you buy, we offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, which we honor fiercely.
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