Many, many organizations use VBA Macros to generate their Word documents. And a good number of those organizations have their VBA macros also saving and profiling (i.e. capturing metadata for) the generated documents in a traditional Document Management system such as iManage FileSite, Documentum or OpenText eDocs / Hummingbird DM / DocsOpen. Having been around these document automation projects for nearly 20 years I am thrilled to report that you can now use VBA macros to generate, save and pr ...[Read More]

From the viewpoint of a user of a document management or email management solution, the ability to save documents and emails by dragging and dropping is a really important feature. You can drag and drop to save an email from your Inbox to another Outlook folder and you can drag and drop to save and move files around in Windows Explorer. So if SharePoint is to be truly easy-to-use, it should also support saving and moving via drag and drop. One of the exciting new features of SharePoint 2013 i ...[Read More]

From a document management perspective one of the good things about SharePoint is that it can maintain a detailed audit log of activity in respect of each document that is stored in SharePoint. The trouble is that the OOB SharePoint user interface does not provide any easy way of seeing the audit trail for a particular document. If you are a Site Collection Administrator you can go into the central console and view displays of the SharePoint Audit Log, but these are extremely large and dense. ...[Read More]

You are storing the documents for your projects in SharePoint – for each project there is a corresponding document library, folder or document set. You want to be able to click on a hyperlink and jump straight into that library, folder or document set so that you can access the documents and emails that have been stored for that project. Not a problem is you are OK to work with those documents and emails in the native SharePoint web browser UI. But what if you prefer to work with documents and ...[Read More]

Maybe like me you have heard people express the view that DM on SharePoint does not work. IT folks tell me that they have come to this view as a result of their business users attempting to store their documents and / or emails in SharePoint instead of in shared drives or Outlook folders and then having those users complain that the new SharePoint-based way of storing documents and emails is clumsy and frustrating and that they would prefer to go back to using Windows and Outlook folders. The ...[Read More]

Sure, users want to be able to drag and drop emails to save them to SharePoint, but they don't always want to save just one email at a time. Frequently users want to drag and drop hundreds of emails to SharePoint in a single step, with accurate metadata capture and minimal time and effort. If you want to save emails to SharePoint 'in bulk', MacroView DMF is the best available SharePoint add-on, and about to get even better. By now pretty much everyone knows that with the out-of-the-box integr ...[Read More]

Your organization has started storing documents and emails in SharePoint - perhaps to replace file shares, or to improve upon personal Outlook folders as a way of managing emails, or maybe even to replace a traditional DM system. One of the reasons for moving to SharePoint is that it has a pretty powerful search capability – you can search for documents based on their content and / or their metadata. How ironic then that one of the complaints that I hear most frequently from users who are tryin ...[Read More]

MacroView DMF provides a Browse mode that displays the tree structure of a SharePoint environment – all the areas that contain documents or emails for which you have access permission and all the areas where you can save additional documents or emails. In any but the smallest organizations, this tree tends to be large – large numbers of sites and sub-sites, each of which can contain multiple document libraries, which in turn can each contain multiple document sets and folders – even trees of fo ...[Read More]

We've all been there – you are in Outlook (or Word or Excel) saving a document to your document management store and you are prompted for metadata – including the Client / Project to which the document relates. This should be easy because the metadata capture / profiling dialog lets you pick a Client / Project from a drop down list that is populated from the main CRM system. Unfortunately this is a new Project so there is no record yet created in the CRM and so nothing to pick. You have to jump ...[Read More]

In early March I attended the LegalTech Asia Technology Summit in Hong Kong and particularly enjoyed a presentation by Stuart Kay from Baker McKenzie. Stuart's presentation was titled Global Solution, Local Adoption and in it he described how Baker McKenzie had successfully rolled out a new legal templates solution - a set of Office 2010 Templates - to over 10,000 users across their 72 offices in 45 countries. The remarkable thing about this solution deployment is that the same set of Office ...[Read More]