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Top 10 Tips for Document Content Productivity from Workshare

Workshare has been working with the legal and corporate legal industries for over five years. In light of this experience and feedback from over half a million users, Workshare believes there are business problems inherent to document centric organizations far beyond the need to compare two document versions. Some of these business problems include:

A variety of desktop applications that exist on their desktops – heightening IT support costs and making it difficult for a document worker to work quickly and efficiently.

Confusion and frustration that arises when users send documents for review via email and receive many versions in return – making it difficult for them to track what document is current and who made what changes and when. This also encourages a user to store documents in email, making it difficult to re-introduce current versions to the document management system.

Document corruption that occurs when users cut and paste document content, merge documents which may be different versions of Microsoft Word, or use track changes with many authors and revisions.

All of these problems lead to a dramatic loss of user productivity – which potentially equates to lost money for a firm or corporation. Think about one lawyer who may work on four contracts a day with changes from 5 - 10 users – if we could save him/her hours a day in document collaboration, rework, formatting, and change tracking on these 40 documents – this could effect your business!

Recently, many of the world’s largest firms have begun analyzing their own document processes and testing or deploying Workshare 3 to validate the value of a content productivity application. Below are just a few tips you can use to begin to analyze if problems exist at your organization today and some steps you can take to control it. Enjoy!

1. Measure document chaos

Establish the scale of the problem in your organization. Are most of the documents you produce critical to your business and do most involve contributions from a team of people before completion? If you fall into the heavy document user category, then your organization needs tools and applications that address the area of content productivity.

2. Focus on ROI and high productivity

Make sure that your revenue-producing employees are focused on those activities that have the highest ROI, and employ practices that make them more productive. Time spent reworking corrupted documents and inputting edits into documents can take much time away from more lucrative activities.

3. Manage the amount of email

Email use has become ubiquitous and the amount of mail and attachments that are sent and received is tremendous. It's hard to keep track of it all. Employees need a way to easily manage collaboration with others on documents they have sent out via email.

4. Deal with multiple contributors

Today's methods for keeping track of many changes and edits to a document are unclear and unreliable, to say the least. Understanding who made what changes, and when can be a tremendously frustrating process. Then, trying to actually incorporate those changes that you agree with only enhances the problem. It is important to keep in mind that much time is spent on this seemingly simple task.

5. Work the way you always have done

Software should not enforce unneeded work practices on your employees and should not require significant training. End users only become frustrated and do not use the software in the way it is intended. Every business is different and many people have specific ways of working and don't appreciate change. Be sure to choose software that is flexible and allows your users to work in the way in which they always have done.

6. Support better collaboration

Global organizations are already collaborating in teams, both ad hoc and formal. Organizations should understand that teams need the supporting infrastructure to increase their productivity and prevent collaboration confusion.

7. Understand what you are sending outside of your organization

Awareness of the risks of document metadata is very low. How many times have you used an old document (client proposals, pricing sheets, press releases, etc.) as a template for a new document? On your computer screen it may appear that you have deleted all of the old text, but it can reappear on your customer's screen. The need for automated removal of historical information from documents is critical - employees can't be relied upon to manually remove all document metadata before they email out documents. End users expect filtering and checks to be carried out automatically.

8. Reduce turn-around time

The importance of delivering information on time can drastically impact overall deadlines. Ensure all team members and document managers have the processes and tools they need to work effectively on documents and reach a final version sooner.

9. Understand the cost implications

How many people in your firm are aware of the cost of missed deadlines? Does anyone in your firm know what this cost is? By understanding the implications for the company and the team, rather than relying on the individuals to deliver information, businesses have more of a vested interest in completing their tasks on time.

10. Get the process moving

Making change in any organization is a challenge. Assess how users work today and understand the cost implications of improving these processes. This will form the basis of getting content productivity moving in your organization.

Workshare is the industry leader in developing and providing premier content productivity applications to the global enterprise. Over 3,500 companies and over 500,000 people in 60 countries use Workshare’s software. Workshare’s software enables streamlined management of collaborative changes to the content of documents. For more information about Workshare’s products please visit www.workshare.com.

Please note the services and products mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect KKL's recommendation of the products or services listed. This listing is done for informational purposes only.