Document Management System: Importance for Better Workflow

As we know, our society is becoming more and more digital. The amount of data and information has grown at an enormous speed. Every day, your company makes and manages a large amount of paperwork, such as contracts, presentations, marketing content, blog posts, HR policies and procedures, training guides, and onboarding guides.

These files may be located in a variety of places like your computer, mobile device, and cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint, etc. By switching to an electronic document management system, companies can automate their workflows and make sure their content has better progress. This gives them more time to focus on important company operations.

Therefore, a solution that could serve this duty was required from Agiliway team in order to ensure that there was no clutter in the work that was being done by workers as well as on the devices that they used. Since Agiliway has considerable experience developing document-related solutions, today, we will discuss the importance of documents in every company and reveal the secrets behind creating our solutions for clients. So, let’s move on to the solution that we’ve been developing and putting into action.

About the product

The inspiration for this project’s creation comes from another system we created in-house. It is written entirely on Azure and based on AWS utilizing test buckets.

The system files are grouped according to the product owners’ requirements and stored in containers called “buckets.” At the bucket level, more permission controls are applied. Because of this, we have set up fine-grained controls over how people can access, store, and get documents.

The idea was that every document contains meta-data. Meta-data describes the information or, in the traditional sense, gives the rules for determining what the data means. Metadata includes the type of document, the dates it is valid (from and to), the author, the editor, keywords or tags that help identify the document, and so on.

The Agiliway development team concentrated on creating such functionalities:

• Information and document sorting;
• Include a mechanism for tracking progress;
• Status for documentation;
• Document tracking and management applications like DocuSign have a notification system that allows you to take action whenever the document’s status changes.

Provided solutions

We have been working on a technical solution, so let’s get to it:

• A front-end has been developed to allow search, filter, edit, and view of different versions of documents, as well as add new keywords, metadata, etc.
• Change tracking is a second feature. This is precisely what the Microsoft Word stack does; the only difference is that we save multiple versions of the document and can always roll back to a previous version to determine who modified it. Since most of the documents were contracts, it was essential to identify the version’s author and date.
• Developed functionality allows each document to have a status; if the document is a contract, its status must be determined.
• Also of note is that our team made it possible to replicate a key feature of document circulation systems like DocuSign, namely, the ability to activate predefined actions in response to a document’s change in status. If the contract receives the “sign” status, then a trigger for this client’s onboarding must be sent, as described in the contract, to one of the portals of another product.
• The database is a PostgreSQL relational tabular database, which consists of auxiliary matching tables that allow you to combine IDs. There is nothing remarkable about the database, however, as everything is stored in buckets and the database simply generates connections between users and buckets.
• In addition, in one of the upcoming versions, we intend to integrate OCR – optical document recognition, or AI that enables you to recognize scanned or PDF documents.

Our team used the following technologies in the project: PostgreSQL, AWS, Azure, lambda function, Clojure, and ClojureScript.

Again, they could acquire this functionality by purchasing an Alfresco document management system or DocuSign, and a few other systems, but doing so would be extremely expensive. And instead, we constructed a system that combines all of these functional properties into a single unit: the document management software. Moreover, this technology is used by various systems to store documents in a wide range of formats (agreements, contracts, forms, medical documents of various types, etc.).

Value delivered

The main secret of our success is our team working together and achieving the top. As we point out, Agiliway has a considerable amount of experience in dealing with papers, and we constructed the system from the ground up, resulting in cost savings for the customer. There are systems like this already created, but they are being offered for sale on the market at extreme prices. Our system’s structure, which is built on document buckets, enables it to be incredibly adaptable when it comes to the modification options that may be applied.

Everything is extremely flexible, which means that you can quickly add any kind of document, document format, and AM access role system, which is what we based on who can read and execute what in the first place. It is straightforward and handy since you create users with similar simplicity, which means that you can control who has access to which documents.

This is of enormous assistance given that some of our employees need to access all the papers in one format while others need to view a selection of the documents in another format. The human access level enables the inclusion of granular access to individual documents and even the supply of access to certain portions of documents, which is a unique feature. This may be done by providing access to specific sections of documents.

When working with Agiliway, clients are assisted in making system-wide modifications that boost efficiency, delight end users, attract new consumers, and broaden the scope of partnerships.

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