Businesses today are virtually swimming in information and content. While data is critical to every layer of operation, there is often simply too much of it for workers to find the relevant information they need. Much of the content in which companies have invested heavily is completely unavailable due to poor organization, and the amount of time workers spend searching for the right document – or re-creating a document they can’t find – represents a serious hit to productivity.
Enterprise content management tools can help. By simplifying the organization of content and automating document-intensive processes, ECM tools minimize the complexity of managing ever-growing volumes of information and enable workers and organizations to use content to drive business performance.
M-Files is an intelligent information management platform that offers best-of-breed enterprise content management tools for organizations in every industry. M-Files makes it easy to find, access and share the documents that employees need to get work done, avoiding frustration, eliminating wasted time and minimizing business risk.
ECM that truly connects your business
Connect all your enterprise content and support your business workflows with M-Files.
Superior ECM systems provide tools that help organizations deal with the dilemma of managing enormous amounts of information in a data-driven business world.
Each day, the world creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data1 – and the speed with which data is created is increasing exponentially2. It’s estimated that by 2025, the amount of digital data worldwide will hit 163 ZB3.
Of all the information in data repositories, more than 50% of it is considered “dark data.”4 This is information that is uncategorized and unknown to the organization, rendering it completely useless. This results in extra expense for storing data that will never be used. But it also represents wasted opportunities, as dark data may hold valuable insight or business intelligence that can’t be accessed.
It’s estimated that 80% to 90% of organizational data is unstructured5 and in a wide range of formats, making it difficult to search and analyze. From videos, graphics and images to presentations, email, social content and websites, this unstructured content is difficult to store and even harder to retrieve unless companies have a way of organizing it effectively.
Information workers spend as much as 30% of each day searching for documents with little success6. ECM software that can eliminate these time-wasting activities can help companies significantly improve productivity while reducing costs.
M-Files offers an enterprise content management solution with a unique approach to organizing content that overcomes all the obstacles of content management today. Rather than focusing on where data is stored, M-Files tags documents with metadata that makes them easy to find no matter where they live within disparate systems, platforms or data silos.
A file’s metadata might describe anything from the type of document it is, the customer it pertains to, important dates within the document, what the status of the document is and what needs to happen to it next. Metadata essentially converts unstructured data into structured content that can be searched for and found in context.
Because files with metadata can live anywhere in the organization – in network folders, SharePoint, CRM platforms or other business systems – M-Files doesn’t require documents to be migrated to a central repository. Rather, M-Files leaves documents exactly where they are and creates connections to provide a single, unified view of content within the organization. AI-powered technology automatically searches for and finds documents, analyzes them to extract information and tags them with metadata that makes them more visible and easily found.
The result is an enterprise content management system where employees no longer need to spend hours each day searching for content, and where organizations can easily see all the information assets under their control.
The Business Case for Enterprise Content Management
Discover how organizations are leveraging ECM to achieve positive bottom-line impact.
M-Files’ ECM solution offers a comprehensive set of enterprise content management tools for taming the complexity of organizing mountains of data and documents.
To find a file, workers can simply type what they’re looking for into the M-Files search bar and get connected with their documents in seconds.
By creating connections to documents throughout the organization, no matter where they reside, M-Files unifies business data and documents across different systems, applications, and archives to deliver a single view via a desktop client, a web browser or a mobile application.
M-Files puts an end to versioning headaches and multiple attachments flying back and forth via email. With M-Files, everyone works with a single, authoritative version of a file that’s accessible via a link.
As documents are co-authored and revised, M-Files stores a history of each successive version, making it easy to track edits and to roll back to an earlier version if necessary.
M-Files can crawl legacy archives and systems to search for documents, find patterns and data, and surface relevant files that add business value.
Content in M-Files is automatically accessible to the right people and the right people only. Dynamic permissions can be defined by criteria like user role, department, project, workflow status and more.
M-Files’ enterprise content management tools let you automate document-intensive workflows to improve efficiency, minimize errors and ensure compliance throughout the lifecycle of each document from creation to final retention or destruction.
One of the most impressive aspects of M-Files is its ability to integrate with an existing technology stack so that workers can continue using familiar tools rather than needing to learn a new platform. M-Files offers several integrations to line-of-business applications, other archives and legacy ECM solutions, which means workers can use the tools they are familiar with – such as Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, Outlook, SharePoint, or Google Workspace – as they access documents via M-Files.
M-Files Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) make it easy for companies to build connections to their own systems so that they can use M-Files to extract more value from their information assets. Third-party add-ins offer even more capabilities and extensibility to adapt M-Files for specific use cases.
What you need, when you need it. That is the way M-Files works. Fast, easy, and intuitive.
You can use your favorite daily tools, such as MS Teams or Salesforce to manage your documents.
Share content securely, and co-author documents simultaneously — wherever you work.
Let M-Files suggest tags for your documents and add workflows for faster processing.
As a next-generation intelligent information management platform, M-Files provides all the enterprise content management tools organizations need to tame the chaos of growing volumes of documents. Simply put, M-Files helps people find and use information more effectively to drive business performance and reduce business risk.
M-Files’ enterprise content management tools can be deployed in the cloud, on premises or in a hybrid solution that combines cloud-based flexibility with on-premises investments in infrastructure. Solution templates and best practices for multiple use cases enable companies to build information management solutions without starting from scratch. And M-Files’ highly configurable platform can be easily customized to support specific use cases and requirements.
It’s no wonder that thousands of organizations in more than 100 countries around the world have chosen M-Files to manage business information and processes.
Enterprise content management tools help companies organize, store, retrieve, secure and retain content more effectively. As the volume of enterprise content continues to double every 1.2 years7, enterprise content management tools play an invaluable role in minimizing the cost and complexity of handling data while enabling organizations and workers to extract maximum value from data and documents.
With the right enterprise content management tools, companies can gain greater visibility into all the information assets under their control. Superior ECM tools make it easy to find the right and latest documents in seconds, preventing workers from wasting hours each day searching for information or dealing with multiple versions and duplicates. ECM systems can also automate many document-intensive tasks to free workers for more strategic priorities and to minimize human error in content management.
Document management systems tend to focus primarily on documents such as contracts, financials, proposals, work plans, reports, depositions and more. Enterprise content management systems manage documents as well, but they also manage other forms of unstructured data such as video files, graphics, audio recordings, websites, social media content, presentations, email and more.