Creating a Competitive Advantage
Improving
productivity is, on its own, one of the top business objectives shared by
companies of all sizes, industries, and geographies. Its direct correlation to
a company’s ability to increase profitability has a compounding effect on its
importance. One of the most cost-effective ways to drive productivity
improvement initiatives is to increase collaboration across the enterprise,
both internally among employees as well as between employees, partners, and
customers, through the use of a standardized set of tools.
Silos
of knowledge and expertise are inherent in every growing and diversified
business, and quickly becomes a drag on efficiency and expense. These can be
overcome with the introduction of information management tools equipped with
built-in or add-on collaboration capabilities. SharePoint is dominating the
capture of market share in the information management space, and
collaboration-enabling add-ons are sure to follow. This whitepaper
investigates some of the critical elements and benefits of instituting
effective SharePoint collaboration.
Controlling Costs Through Collaboration
The need to control costs organization wide is a key reason
to implement collaboration within SharePoint. The economics of supporting
document sharing within the enterprise can be prohibitive, especially when
supplemental individual licenses, per user, are required to support file format
specific programs such as AutoCAD. Additionally, a soft cost that must be
considered is the lag in productivity when employees have to switch between the
document management portal and these individual applications to view
documents. Enabling collaboration in real-time using SharePoint improves the
overall speed of an end to end workflow, because all team members have access to
necessary documents, including all versions of each document. Emailing
document versions back and forth has a number of disadvantages – not only the
wasted time between replies, but also the possibility that several different
versions will be created simultaneously and will have to be merged by hand.
An integrated viewing platform with collaboration
capabilities, including annotations, combined with SharePoint’s user tracking
capabilities, saves time and costs by allowing employees to open any document
type in an embedded browser window, apply markup, and save the new version.
Employees would no longer need to have client licenses for file format support,
or use email to share information. In fact they wouldn’t even need to minimize
or leave the SharePoint site to get work done.
Collaboration and Innovation
Eric
Reis, advisor to venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers,
states that companies who practice "ferocious, customer-centric, rapid
iteration”, in other words, who demonstrate an ability to drive innovation
through collaboration with the ‘extended enterprise’ (consisting not only of
employees, but customers, and partners as well) will realize the return on
their investment in the form of market leadership. Standardizing
on a common, easily shareable file type – such as PDF - enables an organization to
quickly share and extend information, regardless of the original file format in
which a document was created. Deploying a SharePoint-integrated viewing
platform that enables any file type to be converted to PDF, either on demand or
in batch mode, allows internal participants to work seamlessly with their
external counterparts to drive product improvements that give the organization
a competitive advantage.
Sharing proprietary or non-public information with external
sources, in the pursuit of collaborative innovation, is often a proposal that
is met with some trepidation. Loss of intellectual property, exposure of
confidential strategies to the marketplace, and even lawsuits arising from
indiscreet information transfer to third parties are real factors. While
information sharing is increasingly a critical factor for realizing competitive
advantage, the same data must be reasonably protected. A platform that
includes user-level and document-level Digital Rights Management (DRM), coupled
with the ability to burn-in redactions ,thereby preventing an outside user from
selecting or otherwise revealing the underlying text, ensures information security
when dealing with documents, including sensitive data and/or intellectual
property. DRM prevents information from being printed, modified, downloaded,
or saved by end users. By adding DRM control in combination with redactions on
the document, organizations remain in control of exactly what internal data
external participants can see, and most importantly what they can’t see.
Optimizing SharePoint Usage
Despite
the best laid plans to document and enforce a logical, intuitive structure for
an organization’s digital information, many SharePoint sites become unwieldy
from an end-user perspective; hard to navigate and full of homeless documents
that could add incredible value – if only the right people knew where to find
them. An integrated viewing platform allows users to preview and select
documents to work with, using SharePoint’s keyword search to find documents
throughout the site. An embedded viewer allows users to open those documents in
a web browser window, without leaving the site.
The Future of SharePoint
Imagine a workforce with the ability to collaborate on
documents and process complete workflows without ever having to leave their
SharePoint site, download specialty software, search tirelessly through email,
or compile manual versions of team member markups. It’s easy to see why an
organization with an end to end document management and collaboration solution
in place can spend more time working with their extended enterprise to
innovate, rather than having to respond to gaps in their toolbox. Integrating
a powerful, fully-featured viewing platform, as described above, with
SharePoint takes you one step closer to realizing return – not only on your
SharePoint infrastructure investment, but also on your investment in employees,
partners, and customers.
Prizm Content Connect is an enterprise class technology platform with several options
for end user document viewing and collaboration, including a SharePoint Edition
that is perfect for sharing information across an enterprise. Get a Prizm
Content Connect trial or view our online demo.
About the Author
Prateek Kathpal is the founder of Adeptol, a software company
focused on developing imaging applications, which was acquired by Accusoft in
2011. He is currently responsible for the Viewing Products strategy
at Accusoft. Prateek founded Adeptol to create an enterprise-wide viewing
platform and associated solutions, to replace traditional thick client
products. Prior to founding Adeptol, Prateek held senior positions within the
Content Management Division of EMC. Prateek has also worked with EMC
Documentum, NEC, Sapient, Cognizant, JPMorgan Chase and other similar
organizations. He also founded a SaaS Content Management Venture, which was
acquired by a China-based company in 2008. Prateek is an Engineering graduate
with an MBA in Marketing.
About Accusoft
Accusoft
provides a full spectrum of
document, content and imaging solutions. With
its broad range of solutions, Accusoft is committed to deliver best-in-class,
enterprise grade and fully-supported applications and a globally recognized
suite of software development kits (SDKs). Accusoft
products work reliably behind the scenes for capturing, processing, storing and
viewing images, documents and more. Add barcode, compression, DICOM, image
processing, OCR/ICR, forms processing, PDF, scanning, video, and image viewing
to your applications. Products are delivered as
applications and toolkits for multiple 32-bit/64-bit platforms and development
environments, including iOS, Android, .NET, Silverlight, ASP.NET, ActiveX, Java, Linux,
Solaris, Mac OSX, and IBM AIX. For more information, please visit www.accusoft.com.
