Keeping an exact trail of your document edits…
Some people are team players right from the word ‘go’, and need not be told of how to be good with people. They also understand basics of communication, and make an effort to keep a track of all official communication. Unfortunately not all of us are born this way, and need to learn tips and tricks to keep our communication skills sharp. Of course, you could use technology to get rid of some basic hindrances to organizational transparency. Here are a few ways GLOBODOX document management software lets you communicate better, even when it’s just editing documents.
#Use of Annotations
A document edited on paper or with just a word editor leaves a lot of blank spaces. Sometimes it’s difficult to convey the reasons behind a certain action taken by the document editor. Here annotations that go beyond simple text explanations can do you a world of good. With the annotation feature in GLOBODOX you can draw, highlight, stamp, and write comments, etc. directly over an image. This offers a great way to explain the reasons why you have edited a part of document in a certain way without having to go through the whole document with the other person.
#Use of Versions
Sometimes, there are documents that you are not sure about. You really want to see earlier versions of the document to see the “history” of the document. This is why GLOBODOX allows you save each version of the document separately to avoid confusion, as you can even save notes with each version that tell you exactly what changes were made to the document. This is great communication tool for teamwork, and when a document is changing hands a lot times.
#using the Redact tool for Sensitive Documents
Now, as we are talking about teamwork, it brings another interesting point. Sometimes there are parts of document that are just not for everyone’s eyes, no matter how trusted they are. However you still have to share the document with such people and manually remove the parts that they don’t need to know about. This makes it prone to human error, and sensitive information leakage. This is where ‘Redact’ comes in handy as it allows you to hide certain parts of a document with ease. Needless to say, it saves you a great deal of time and effort..
#using Draft tool to avoid publishing premature documents
Many organizations have an internal or external publishing process, for editing their websites or journals, or newsletters. Obviously a lot of care is taken that no content error should be found, and as a result the process is made up of many drafts. While it works most of the times like a charm, there are those nasty moments when a draft gets published by mistake, and then everyone have to do a lot of firefighting. This is why GLOBODOX allows an optional module, the draft tool. It lets you create drafts or minor versions of a document for example, doc1.1, doc1.2, doc 1.3 etc. Since the document is still in drafting stage, no one can think of using it or publishing it directly until its release as Doc 2.0. In fact you restrict access to a draft to just a few people and make the document available to more people only after it has been upgraded to a major version. It saves a lot of time and effort that goes into maintaining various drafts. This tool is especially nifty for companies that deal with a lot of public content.
#Using Check-in / Check-out for overwriting/deleting of content
Alright, imagine this situation. You and your colleague are working on a same document. While you were out for lunch, he did some changes, and went off to lunch himself, forgetting to inform you while he did so. Since you did not know about the changes, you finished your part and sent the document to a contact outside of the company. Now this may not be such a big deal if the changes were just cosmetic. However it’s the possibility of disaster that should improve a process and not a disaster itself. With check-in and check-out, everyone knows that a particular document is being edited by someone, and until then its unavailable for others to edit. Think of it like a library, just more awesome in technology.
These were some of the methods which you can use to build processes for effective document and information management. What process do you use in your company, is it equally effective. Do share it with our readers! Hope you had a good time reading. As always your suggestions and comments are eagerly awaited.
