The challenge of digital document management

Any digital document management solution must overcome a number of obstacles to the effective and secure use of information.

Too many documents

Businesses are generating documents and data at unprecedented rates. Finding the right document in a quickly growing sea of information gets harder every day. It’s estimated that knowledge workers may spend as much as 50% of their day hunting for documents, finding and correcting errors, and searching for sources to confirm data they don’t trust¹. Additionally, more than half of business information today is considered “dark data” – that is, data that is uncategorized and unknown to the organization but nevertheless taking up costly space in information archives².

Multiple versions

More than two-thirds of knowledge workers admit that their email inbox is their primary source for storing and managing documents. When collaboration amounts to emailing attachments back and forth, the number of versions of a document can multiply exponentially, making it difficult and time-consuming to identify the most recent version.

Cyber threats

To get work done when they can’t access information easily, employees frequently put sensitive information at risk by downloading files to personal devices and using personal file-sharing apps – even when such technology is expressly prohibited for security reasons. From inadvertent leaks to the theft of data during a breach, security issues in digital document management pose enormous risk to the organization.

Mobile workforces

Even before 2020, a growing number of employees were working remotely or from home offices. These workers require fast access to documents no matter where they are working. Yet the vast majority of workers lack company-wide support for mobile access to documents³, seriously jeopardizing productivity and complicating document workflows.

M-Files: a smarter way to work

M-Files is a next-generation intelligent information management platform that offers solutions for all the challenges of digital document management. In addition to a set of powerful enterprise content management tools, M-Files offers a fundamentally different approach to document management that radically transforms how companies organize information.

Rather than organizing documents around locations – in other words, where documents are stored – M-Files focuses on tagging documents with metadata that makes them easier to identify, find and incorporate in workflows. Metadata can be anything from the name of a customer or project, the person who created the file, the format of the information in the document, who needs to see the document and in what order, as well as invoice numbers, project numbers, due dates and any other relevant information.

By using metadata, M-Files makes it possible for employees to simply type a few words about what they’re looking for into a search bar and get connected to a document in seconds. Workers no longer need to remember in which system a document was stored, how it was named, or in which directory it’s located. Documents can even remain in their original location in whatever archive, system, application, or platform they were created. M-Files uses AI-powered technology to create connections to documents wherever they exist, delivering a single, unified view of information throughout the organization.

M-Files’ document management solution makes it easy to find, use, and share documents. Workflows help automate processes that guide files throughout the document lifecycle. Encryption and access rights ensure the security of documents, while easy collaboration tools mean that employees no longer need to resort to shadow IT. And because workers can access documents on any device, from any location, at any time, M-Files ensures that remote workers have all the information they need to do their jobs.