Document Management

Finally, document management that people want to use

Document management is, in principle easy. You want a safe place to store information. You want access control. It should be as easy as possible to add documents, change them and find them.

So why make it difficult?

CommonSense is the new way to manage your documents. Security is strong but almost invisible to users. They just see what you want them to see. Documents are automatically stored, indexed and tracked.

The Taxonomy

We help you define and manage a flexible structure for storing information. An easy to understand hierarchy that can evolve with your business needs.

Placing a document under the "customer contracts" folder means the document is related to a contract with a customer - so you've already given CommonSense enough information to help find it.

Documents can be cross filed in several locations - but with only one physical document.

Security rules define who has access to each area so you can restrict access and administration rights based on each users role and department.

Adding documents

Just drag a new document from your file system and drop it into a folder. That's it.

The document is stored, it inherits the security rules from its location and is automatically indexed and available.

A rich set of additional information can be added including tags, a quick description, background notes and when it should be available (start and end dates).

If the document can get out of date, add a reminder that it needs to be reviewed in 12 months - you'll automatically get a reminder.

And what's a document?

It's anything you need to store and manage. It's MS Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, presentations, project plans, drawings, PDF's, videos, photos, manuals - pretty much every type of information you could imagine.

You can also include external documents such as pages from a partner's web site, links to external web applications, documents on networked drives, SharePoint libraries. CommonSense won't be able to deliver the same version control over external content but we will track access and offer the same rich search and retrieval capabilities.

Updating documents

When documents are updated, just add the new version. The previous version is automatically archived.

You can update details at any time and be confident that previous versions and an audit trail of changes are always available.

Experts can review the changes and restore a previous version in seconds.

Finding documents

Document management isn't about filing documents, it's about being able to find and use them.

Documents can be found using their content or augmented with your own tags and meta data.

Searches are based on a flexible formula that you can control and tune to meet your specific needs. Tools such as a lexicon mean you can define equivalent phrases and terminology to suit your business language.

Every search is tracked and automatically reviewed to understand if we found high quality results or even if we found too many results.

Reviewing documents

CommonSense tracks every action giving you a total audit trail for every document. You can see who has loaded, updated, viewed or distributed a document including previous versions.

This enables you to understand how people are using the system. Is it meeting their needs, what documents are useful and which ones aren't?

Review dates and publish ranges help ensure that your documents are kept up to date - but you're not on your own. Every time someone access a document they can share comments, suggestions and complaints with you. This means everyone from the author to end customers becomes part of your quality process.

Driving continuous improvement through daily usage of CommonSense.