Email collaboration is difficult, and outdated

Jan. 31, 2012 - PRLog -- You know the scenario: you and some others start an email discussion about an attached document. A few people have feedback. A few people may even change the file and email this around. Pretty soon you have lost track of which file is the most up-to-date. You are not even sure if the appropriate feedback been worked into the document. This is an extremely common scenario; in fact it seems to be one nearly everyone in the business world is familiar with. It is so commonplace that most of us have not yet realized that this is a thing of the past. It is part and parcel of the web-culture that existed before the world met social-media, and before businesses began implementing team collaboration solutions.

Todays’ world is meeting the next stage of office communications, Enterprise Content Management (ECM). ECM solutions, particularly SharePoint, are being adopted at unprecedented rates. This is profoundly changing the dynamics of inter-office communication and therefore productivity. Today’s teams need to be able to simultaneously work together on a document. We want the ability to send documents to others and request feedback or approval. We need the ability to have every version of our documents automatically kept safe, so that if we ever need to review them we can. When we need to find a project, team or company document, we should be able to simply go to a search page and find it.

Broadly speaking, we need to get rid of useless activity and get freed up to do our work. When done well, this is the role that ECM plays for an organization. At its’ core, this is what ECM excels at.

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Sabel Collaborations is a SharePoint consulting and development firm headquartered in Atlanta, Ga. It focuses on key areas of corporate IT such as team collaboration, business process improvement, document automation, regulatory compliance and portal development.