Capture content: Successful DMS solutions depend on the ability to capture content, whether existing on paper or electronically, and bring it into a managed environment. Integration with third-party scanning and imaging technology allows paper content such as loan applications, claims, and other documents to be saved in electronic formats within the library along with the required metadata for proper processing. In order to encourage users to store and retrieve content from a centrally managed location, organizations can customize the File Open and File Save dialog boxes to promote these storage locations.

Categorize and organize content : In order to be useful to users within the organization, content must be categorized, saved, and organized appropriately. A central document repository is implemented using a special template that is designed to be the central repository for a division within a company or for an entire organization. These large-scale sites are generally designed, deployed, and managed by a professional IT staff and provide a consistent way for all business units to organize and categorize information.
Most organizations produce sets of documents that play a distinct role in the business and share common characteristics, such as the properties that describe them, the policies that apply to them, and the processes they undergo. For example, pharmaceutical companies create clinical trial reports, and manufacturing companies produce specifications. Content types allow users to define document sets based on their shared behaviors and apply consistent metadata for categorization. Each content type can specify a document template, a schema, edit and display forms, policies, workflow processes, or even customized behaviors. Using content types provides a way to standardize these characteristics across different libraries and sites throughout an organization and provides a way to categorize content in a standard manner.

Find and retrieve relevant information: One goal of moving information into a managed environment is to allow users to easily find the relevant information they need to facilitate the re-use of knowledge in an organization. MindField Document Management Solution has an integrated search engine that uses the latest search algorithms from Microsoft Research to return fast and relevant search results. Users can find information not only from their content repository, but also from multiple external sources such as file shares, by using advanced, full-text search from within their integrated organizational portal. This search can include results for various file types and data sources using extensibility mechanisms, and cannot only find information/data, but also the relevant people who are experts in the search topics. These “experts” are found and organized by their degrees of separation from the user based on the user’s known contacts.

Allow for structured document authoring: The new Microsoft Office Open XML format supported by the Office 2007 client software, combined with the server-side functionality for specifying content types, gives an organization the ability to set up an environment for authors to create documents with a consistent look and feel, while at the same time facilitating re-use of content. The Office Open XML format enables an organization to define templates using an XML schema that is most suitable for their business requirements. This schema can consist of tags that correspond to various sections of a document, such as <Executive Summary/>, <MainBody/>, and <Conclusion/>.

A template for a particular type of document is created by referencing this predefined XML schema and creating the presentation and layout for the various sections of the document. This template is then associated with a content type, along with associated workflow and information management policies in the document library. When an author initiates a new document of this type, he or she is presented with the template created as above and can use this template to author the document.

This approach also allows an organization to control which fields in the document can be modified, and which are protected from changes (for example, legal disclaimers). Re-use of content is possible because the content is automatically tagged with the appropriate XML code and can be programmatically processed for document assembly, distribution, and conversion.

Collaborate on documents: When multiple authors are likely to be working on the same document, check-out and versioning features are helpful for smoothing out collaboration. MindField Document Management Solution facilitates collaboration on documents by enabling library functions such as check-in/check-out and major/minor versioning. Requiring authors to check out a document before making changes ensures that everyone collaborating on a document knows who is making edits at any given time.

Versioning: With major and minor versioning, authors can distinguish a major revision that includes substantive changes from a minor revision of only spelling and wording. The compare versions feature adds further checks to this process by allowing users to compare the differences between any two versions of a document. Item-level security ensures that appropriate rights (e.g., modify, read, and so forth) are given to the various people who are collaborating on the document.

Set policies to audit usage and track information: When documents leave the repository—for example, as paper printouts or individual files distributed through e-mail—it is important that contextual properties be included in those documents. Labeling and bar code policies enable users to reference important information, such as approvals and associated documents, right from within a document. Label policies can be set to specify which document properties should be included in the label and how the label should be formatted. When a user authors a document that is subject to those policies, the Office application inserts the label directly into the document content and updates the label as needed when the properties change.

Protect information: In order to protect information in a repository, library owners can set specific security permissions on individual folders or files to ensure that only authorized people have the right to view, change, or delete content from this library. In order to protect documents once they have left the repository (for example when someone downloads a file to their laptop), administrators can set an Information Rights Management (IRM) policy on a library that gets applied to a document when it leaves the repository. This ensures that sensitive formation is not inadvertently sent outside the organization or stolen from a laptop. In some cases, content such as spreadsheets can be protected so that only “published” portions are available via a Web browser. In this way, information that needs to be shared, such as a table, chart, or graph, can be broadly shared while still protecting the confidential information contained within the spreadsheet.

Automate business processes: MindField Document Management Solution automates business processes by providing workflow capabilities that are integrated with the content repository and forms capabilities. Tasks can be created and assigned to participants with notification to alert them about the task. Participants can follow the progress of a workflow by checking the status page associated with the workflow. In addition to standard status information such as outstanding tasks, the status page also includes history information that is specifically designed by the workflow author. Organizations can create custom workflows using tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio 2005/2008 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, or MindField Business Process Management. After a workflow is deployed to a site collection, it appears in the list of workflows that list administrators can add to content types, lists, or libraries. When a workflow is added to a document library or list, the workflow is then available so that users can start the workflow for any item in that list.

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