Document management software is capable of many things, so the processes can be as simple or as complex as needed. Document workflow software also makes looking at the big picture easier and more natural.
You can see which employees have a queue of work to do and which have lighter loads, making redistribution efforts more effective. A big picture view keeps projects moving. Document management workflow software benefits businesses by improving internal productivity, collaboration, morale and accountability. It also decreases the resources required to complete work. All of these things combined work to save money and improve the bottom line. And in case you were wondering, the biggest benefit of document management workflow is the assurance that things will operate properly and efficiently.
Document management software provides:. Document management solutions are designed to provide your company with better business management and organization capabilities. As we've established, implementing a document management solution offers your company a number of benefits.
But done incorrectly, these efforts can create more headaches than they solve. By assessing your current workflow process and document management style, you're most likely to implement an effective solutions for your company.
Here are some questions and insights to help you choose a document management workflow solution. Your industry's document security compliance and regulatory demands will play a role in selecting the solution for your business.
Collaboration allows employees to share files and edit group documents in real time. It prevents needing to shuffle and track multiple versions of the same document. The answers to these questions will help guide your business toward the right solution. There are two key factors to consider when analyzing access to business documents: internal and external access. From an internal perspective, is there a need within the company to provide employees with both on-site access via workstations on the company network and mobile access via a secure connection on a web browser, smartphone or tablet?
What about external, third-party vendors? One such example would be a web portal that gives your company the ability to push documents through a website to allow secure client access. You may want a document management workflow solution capable of integrating with other systems in your office. For example, if you operate an accounting firm, a document management system that integrates easily with QuickBooks may add a lot of efficiency. Additionally, you may find that integration with your email is desirable.
Every company has a different policy for record retention and disposal. While some firms need to retain documents for months, if not years, others have no need for long-term storage. Simplify document organization and standardization while adding context and enhancements to imported information.
Consolidate and connect information for big-picture insight and operational improvements. Perform quality and compliance reviews to ensure document completeness, accuracy and authenticity. Distribute documents and drawings to ensure full compliance with control procedures and requirements. Create, enforce and maintaining document control procedures and work instructions to ensure consistency and accuracy across the organization.
Update and process documents to make sure that all relevant personnel have access to the latest, most complete drawings, specification logs, and binders. Accurately number, sort, file, and store all relevant electronic and hard copy documents needed in your organization.
This provides users with complete, actionable facilities and asset data they can use to increase efficiency and save money. It also ultimately: Provides a single source of truth for all documentation.
Helps organizations maintain regulatory compliance, Provides configurable workflows to streamline collaboration with all internal departments. Provides comprehensive document version control and simplifies auditing. What are the best document management systems?
There are a few key features of a best-in-class document management system EDMS. Above all, the right document management system needs to be easy-to-use, intuitive and highly adopted by your employees. It also needs to provide: A single source of truth for all mission-critical data to maintain the quality, accurate, and completeness of your data and metadata. Easy-to-configure workflows that allow for streamlined collaboration. Easy document version control and auditing of documents to maintain regulatory compliance and ensure that everyone is working on the correct version.
Easily accessible data to maximize staff productivity and support personnel safety. What are the advantages of an electronic document management system? The right electronic document management system will provide many advantages, helping users: Process, store and retrieve records. Simplify their document version control. Streamline collaboration across departments, facilities and devices.
Improve their timelines, which in turn can improve audit and inspection readiness. Increase document control and document security Lower costs Streamline knowledge management. Facilitate compliance. While both tools work to manage documents and content, a CMS is generally used to store Web content from various websites, while an EDMS focuses more on internal documentation for storage, reference, workflow management and process improvement.
What is the typical ROI for electronic document management? An electronic document management system delivers both immediate and long-term ROI improvements. In the short-term, an EDMS can immediately improve cash flow by reducing paper costs and increasing employee efficiency.
Over time, ROI improvements will be seen in the form of: Savings per document Reduced timelines for companies using document management when it comes to payroll, turnaround, invoicing and other key processes. Document-related cost reduction More efficient customer service and public service Reduced storage and archival costs More effective collaboration and document modification.
What are some electronic document management system examples? If you run a smaller operation, you may not need ultra-robust document management that can be found with an enterprise tool like Meridian. Here are some real examples of how Meridian helped organizations: MSCM Ltd integrated Meridian with Solidworks, one of their existing systems, to consolidate documents and streamline their document management.
Zurich Airport used the enterprise electronic document management system to improve data and plan consistency across their organization. Seattle City Light improved their engineering data integrity — and, in turn, their compliance and productivity.
What is ISO document control? There are many competing standards around the world for BIM and EDM tools, though these are largely being replaced by the ISO standards, which will eventually be adopted by the entire world. These include ISO , which calls for document control. This ultimately helps ensure that important engineering documents are up-to-date, comprehensive, and trustworthy, which can ultimately both increase compliance and improve operational efficiency over time.
Why is EDMS required? Particularly for businesses with lots of documentation — or those looking to digitally transform their operations — an EDMS can provide many necessary improvements to operations and workflow.
These benefits include: Cost savings. Disaster recovery. Figure 8 shows devices supporting a hypervisor, with separate interfaces for the hypervisor console, the hypervisor management interface, virtual machine migration traffic, and two Fibre Channel HBAs to provide access to shared storage.
Pairs of Ethernet NICs are shown connected to virtual switches in the hypervisor. Each interface connects to a virtual link that terminates at a virtual port in the fabric interconnect, giving the flexibility of virtual networking with the visibility and control of physical networks. Integrate with data center networks and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure. Condensing multiple network layers into a single physically distributed but logically centralized connectivity domain makes the process of integrating Cisco UCS into data center networks straightforward.
Rather than appearing as an entire network with a collection of servers, Cisco UCS is integrated as a single system. This simplification is accomplished using both Ethernet and Fibre Channel end-host modes. This approach gives the fabric interconnects complete control over the unified fabric within Cisco UCS and allows greater utilization of uplink port bandwidth through the use of active-active Ethernet uplinks.
Cisco VICs support fabric failover at the device level, so losing one of the two fabrics can be transparent to the operating system or hypervisor. They can implement best practices for each type of network:. Cisco UCS is designed for high availability, with no single point of failure in its network infrastructure. The fabric interconnects are designed to work in an active-active model, with automated failover of network management in the event of a failure.
The system is designed so that if either fabric A or fabric B fails, the remaining fabric will take on the traffic from the failed fabric. Cisco VICs support fabric failover by moving traffic from one fabric to the other according to failover policies established on a per-NIC basis.
This eliminates complicated operating system or hypervisor NIC teaming configuration. Fabric failover makes the failure of a fabric transparent to the operating system or hypervisor. Figure 9 illustrates that different types of network modalities have different best practices for failover, and Cisco VICs support both.
Fabric failover is typically configured for Ethernet because it avoids complex operating system and hypervisor configuration. In the example, vNIC 1 connects primarily to fabric A but fails over to fabric B in the event of a fabric failure. Fibre Channel is typically cabled with two networks with the driver software handling failover, so HBAs 3 and 4 connect to fabrics A and B, respectively, without fabric failover configured.
The API enables our own management tools and also a rich ecosystem of third-party tools that can be used for everything from monitoring the system to automating processes through scripting languages. Cisco UCS is the only system designed from the beginning to abstract every aspect of system personality, configuration, and connectivity from the hardware so that it can be configured through software.
Everything from firmware revisions to network profiles are abstracted into more than configuration variables that fully specify each server. In this sense the system is stateless, and any of the management tools using the Cisco UCS unified API can set server state and thus automate the integration of servers into systems. From one perspective, Cisco UCS does for physical servers what hypervisors do for virtual machines: it creates an environment in which any server can be configured through software to support almost any workload.
This increases flexibility, utilization, and business agility. The Cisco UCS unified API enables higher-level tools to turn the knobs and program the infrastructure by setting the abstracted state variables. This applies whether your Cisco UCS servers are deployed within a single UCS connectivity domain unified with fabric interconnects or standalone servers not connected to fabric interconnects. The Cisco UCS unified API is uniquely positioned to adopt evolving standards while continuing to provide a premier framework for automation.
While the API remains constant, how you access it depends on what management tools you use. When the fabric interconnects are configured in Intersight managed mode, the fabric interconnects act as a proxy that makes all of the server configuration state variables available to Intersight.
The fabric interconnects use Intersight Secure Connect technology to make the connection as secure as if an isolated management network were configured. Intersight provides a single control point for organizations to help teams work securely, collaborate better, work smarter, and get the job done faster. Intersight is a unified, secure Software-as-a-Service SaaS platform with modules that provide support for everything from basic infrastructure configuration tasks to real-time workload optimization using visibility into how your applications are using the infrastructure on which they run.
The SaaS nature of Intersight means that you have access to all of the latest features automatically. Intersight supports complete lifecycle management, from Day 0 deployment using role- and policy-based server profiles, to Day N optimization and support.
It supports your bare-metal servers, hypervisors, Kubernetes, and serverless deployments, helping you transform with AIOps to reach the scale and velocity your stakeholders demand. Intersight spans all of your Cisco UCS infrastructure, whether or not it is connected through Cisco UCS fabric interconnects, creating a single management domain with unlimited scale.
The Intersight Infrastructure Service Figure 10 enables you to configure the identity, personality, and connectivity of modular, blade, and rack servers. It provides access to automated deployment for entities such as Cisco HyperFlex clusters, and it can automate and support large-scale edge deployments.
The service provides the following capabilities that are complementary to the basic deployment and configuration features:.
Cisco Intersight is a modular platform with services to support a wide range of infrastructure and application lifecycle activities. The system can open cases and upload supporting documentation for fast resolution. It maintains the status of your contracts and licenses so that you can administer them from the same interface. This feature gives you recommendations on configurations and help you implement best practices.
Intersight has insight into your operating system and driver versions. Information on the other services supported by Cisco Intersight are available at cisco. Cisco UCS Manager. Because Cisco UCS integrates computing and networking, it is aware of any device connected to it. When the system is first powered on, or when a new component is added, the system discovers the components and adds them to its internal model of the system configuration. Cisco UCS Manager is model based, allowing administrators to create models of desired server configurations and then configure them simply by associating a model with the physical resources.
The system helps guarantee consistent, error-free, policy-based alignment of server personalities with workloads, increasing standards compliance. Server configuration is essentially guaranteed to be correct because Cisco UCS Manager automatically sequences configuration steps and backs them out if an error occurs.
Role- and policy-based management preserves current administrator roles server, storage, and network , helps administrators be more effective in their jobs, helping to reduce overall cost. After configuration, Cisco UCS Manager aggregates element monitoring so that every aspect of the system can be monitored from the GUI or through higher-level tools. Cisco IMC gives you access to standalone rack server configuration.
Intersight Secure Connect technology provides a framework to scale and extend the universe of Intersight cloud-managed devices. It provides enterprise-class, secure connectivity to Cisco UCS, Cisco HyperFlex, Cisco converged infrastructure, and an expanding set of third-party hardware and software platforms including storage systems from NetApp, Pure Storage, and Hitachi.
You can create and test scripts using the emulator installed on a PC or laptop computer. Cisco UCS infrastructure can be programmed on demand to support DevOps practices through a variety of tools and scripting languages. The following tools, described in our management handbook , are designed to support programmable configuration of standalone rack servers:. Cisco UCS integrated infrastructure solutions. We offer solutions from an ecosystem of integrated infrastructure partners, including:.
When the system is powered on, or when new components are configured in the system, components are added to a hierarchical model that represents all the objects in the system. This model acts as the single source of truth for all connected components and their configuration.
Physical components are configured by manipulating the model, not the actual devices. You can classify servers into resource pools based on criteria including physical attributes such as processor, memory, and disk capacity and location for example, blade chassis slot. Server pools can help automate configuration by identifying servers that can be configured to assume a particular role such as web server or database server and automatically configuring them when they are added to a pool.
Resource pools are collections of logical resources that can be accessed when configuring a server. In typical use cases, subject-matter experts define the way different classes of systems are to be configured by creating resource pools and policies that cover their specific domains of expertise.
For example, network administrators can create policies that determine every aspect of the way that a Microsoft Exchange Server should connect to the network. These policies can indicate that certain aspects of identity should be drawn from a specific resource pool—for example, a pool of MAC addresses dedicated to Microsoft Exchange Server NICs. Management tools support typical divisions of responsibility in IT departments while giving each role visibility into the actions taken by other roles, enhancing communication and simplifying coordination between roles.
Role-and policy-based management makes organizations more effective because administrators can configure policies once, and then administrators at any level of authority can use these policies to configure a server.
Cisco UCS service profiles and templates. Administrators can select among policies to create a Cisco UCS service profile known as a server profile in Intersight , which is the complete specification for how a system should be identified, configured, and connected to IP and storage networks Figure For example, an administrator might select server, network, and storage access policies designed to support Oracle database servers.
Cisco UCS service profiles also can include storage profiles. Disk groups specify a group of disks characterized by the number and type of disks, RAID level, and number of spares. From a disk group, administrators can create virtual disks that are connected to servers as if they were physical drives. This capability is particularly useful for configuring disks in storage-intensive servers such as the Cisco UCS C rack servers and S Storage Servers.
Whereas a Cisco UCS service profile dictates how to configure a single server, Cisco UCS Manager supports service profile templates that dictate how to create multiple service profiles. These templates can be used to create Cisco UCS service profiles to configure hundreds of servers as easily as you can configure one. Cisco UCS service profiles and templates allow Cisco UCS to be treated as a flexible, configurable pool of resources that can be configured rapidly and accurately to support changing workloads and business conditions:.
For example, a server that supports a web server farm during the day can be repurposed to support a virtualization cluster at night simply by changing the service profile associated with the server. Changing versions in a Cisco UCS service profile template can cause all server configurations derived from it to be updated. Figure 12 illustrates a workflow in which subject-matter experts create policies that contribute to the definition of a Cisco UCS service profile template.
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