Every organization which creates collaborative documents, whether they are budgets, presentations, reports, spreadsheets, or other documents recognizes that collaborative efforts are requirement. That collaboration always forces
5 eternal document collaboration questions: Who? What? Where? When? How? The reason I refer to them as eternal is that every day businesses are faced with these questions and rarely find answers when they collaborate on documents.
Business frantically searched for groupware solutions that answers 5 questions of document collaboration, and this informational article is written to provide helpful information on technology that is now available to bring answers.
Three helpful groupware software technologies will be presented and referred to throughout this article as means of answer-finding, as a refreshing relief to more common question-making of collaboration. These technologies are Digital Thread technology, Version History technology, and Document Signature technology. These three groupware technologies function as “triple threat” against document chaos.
Who?
From start, it is important to state that accurate records are key to keeping track of editorial or collaborative process. So much record keeping gets jumbled because documents and drafts are spread out across many different places and collaborators like butter over too much bread. As deadline nears, searches become more frantic. “Who has which draft?” or “Who made this change?” are questions that will frequently arise.
Imagine finishing up months of contract negotiation yielding a contract of hundreds of pages and asking your committee at that point about changes that have been made in an effort to track who did or has what. It simply will not work. Not even participant will remember all of their own contributions.
No business wants messy records. The groupware market has advanced to such a point that a groupware solution to question “who?” is now available. Digital Thread, for example, creates a tracking device in meta data of all documents created in everyday MS applications businesses use. This tracking reaches across servers and emails to create a virtual family tree of document drafts, even if you are working with clients or others who do not have this technology. Version History compiles document family tree into a flowchart, and Document Signature lets you know who has worked on draft every time you open a draft from your hard drive or email. You will never lose track of who did or has what.
What?
Often, when opening an email attachment, you might be asking yourself “What version am I looking at?” “What draft is this?” “What am I supposed to do now?” or a myriad of other “what’s.” The time for questions like this is not time your company can afford. This groupware technology will track documents and their drafts, allowing you to always know what you are looking at and which draft it is. Then you will know exactly what to do with it.
