Electronic Storage of Documents - Paperless System

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Rockanna

Our company is moving to a paperless system. We are scanning our qualtiy documents, contractual documents, supplier documents, etc.

What software system does your company use to index these type of documents? H
Have you elminated all offsite storage of documents?

We are not looking for Vendors to call upon us; we want some advice from USERS of the software.
 
M

mshell

I went through the same thing about 2 years ago. It is a lot of work (good luck). We stored all of our files in PDF (Adobe) format. It is a program that most organizations have and if they do not have it, they can download it at no charge. Hope this helps. :bigwave:
 
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D

David Hartman

Rockanna said:
Have you elminated all offsite storage of documents?

But have you given consideration to offsite storage of the computer files? (For disaster recovery) :bigwave:
 
R

Rockanna

Reply - CD & DVD's Stored In Bank Vault

In response to CD or DVD's, we store a copy offsite in a bank vault along with our network backup tapes.
Since 9-11, we have attempted to ensure we are covered in that area.
 

Wes Bucey

Prophet of Profit
Rockanna said:
Our company is moving to a paperless system. We are scanning our qualtiy documents, contractual documents, supplier documents, etc.

What software system does your company use to index these type of documents? H
Have you elminated all offsite storage of documents?

We are not looking for Vendors to call upon us; we want some advice from USERS of the software.
I've tried a lot of different software over the past five years (working copies and demo copies.)

I've never found the perfect one which meets all criteria, but several which have fit pretty well with my organization at that time.

I have been using paperless systems since 1992 when I wrote my own tracking system using Access and a lot of macros to generate needed shipping documents and labels without having to re-enter data. I confess now that I thought I needed "my own system" to keep control. What I ended up with was a "Tiger by the tail" which had me constantly tinkering as I discovered new things to address.

My philosophy has now changed 180 degrees to buying everything off the shelf from a company I hope can stay in business to give me updates as they become available.

Look at my post
http://elsmar.com/Forums/showthread.php?p=63324#post63324
to get some idea of how our system operates. I am sorry, but I make it a personal policy never to praise or bash a commercial organization by name in a forum like this, so I won't give you a company name of the software provider.

If you are curious about my ideas of criteria to consider in choosing document management software, send me an email or private message. If I get too many replies, I'll post the criteria for the Cove.
 

Wes Bucey

Prophet of Profit
Rockanna said:
In response to CD or DVD's, we store a copy offsite in a bank vault along with our network backup tapes.
Since 9-11, we have attempted to ensure we are covered in that area.
Might I suggest you explore an automatic nightly (or more frequent) backup to one or more offsite servers via a Virtual Private Network? If any one server fails, you can always connect to one of the remaining ones and have a practically seamless transition. Servers can be bought and placed in branches or you can contract for server space at a commercial "server farm" with 24/7 maintenance of server and "backbones" to the internet.
 

bpritts

Involved - Posts
We use IQS as our doc't distribution system. It provides all of the controls
that you need to meet ISO 9000. I'm not thrilled with its user interface, but
it works. We looked at a number of other systems at the time (4 or 5 years
ago) and this was the best for its price range. When we purchased you
had to commit to the whole product suite but I believe that it now can be
unbundled.

One other neat little product is called QuickView Plus. This is a general purpose
file viewer program. If you need to be able to view files from a zillion different
formats (autocad, MS Word, Excel, Word Perfect, JPG, BMP, etc...) this one
program can do them all. It doesn't do the control functions but it allows you
to read any file from any workstation without installing the applications.
This is important if you need to have lots of PC's reading files from different
applications. It was very cheap to get on a site license basis (again, this
was about 5 yrs ago; not sure what their terms are now. For a while,
it came free with Word Perfect. ) This would save you the trouble of converting
a bunch of old files to PDF's. You work out the cost benefit; it will depend on
how many files and app's you have.

Regards,

Brad
 
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