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]

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]

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]

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]

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, SharePoint 2010 was a major advance over SharePoint 2007, but SharePoint 2013 is a much more incremental step forward from SharePoint 2010. This paper looks at two new features of SharePoint 2013 –searching based on FAST (a definite improvement) and drag and drop saving of emails and attachments (which is disappointing). Searches Based on FAST Technology P The most significant DM improvement with SharePoint 2013 is related to FAST search. Once an expens ...[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]

Organizations that have deployed a traditional DM system such as iManage FileSite or OpenText eDocs will be familiar with the way a Word macro can capture details for a new document and then save and profile the document, without any prompting from the DM system. This technique is often used to streamline the preparation of high-use documents – the user needs only to complete the custom form (or forms) displayed by the Word macro and does not also need to complete the DM profiling form. Macro ...[Read More]

​This blog post is an extract of a MacroView White Paper. Download the full White Paper here. As more organizations explore the potential of using Microsoft SharePoint for Document Management and Email Management a question that arises frequently is “What is the best Information Architecture for a SharePoint DM store?”  In other words, what is the best way to arrange the various SharePoint 2010 ‘building blocks’ – Site Collections, Sites, Document Libraries, Document Sets, Folders and metadat ...[Read More]