Archive: Mac Document Management

As your business grows, more-and-more documents become essential to your operation. Contracts, correspondence, project files, and tax records get generated – and scattered – throughout your organization. How long does it take you to find a file? Who has the documents associated with a particular client? Which version of a particular file or document is the final copy? How many copies of your vital documents exist in your organization?

If you are having problems answering those questions, then it is time to invest in a document management system that allows you to manage electronic and scanned documents – centrally, securely, and backed up.

Congratulations if you’ve already taken the first steps of sharing your files on a central file server, scanning paper documents, or using cloud services to store and share your business documents. As your file management system storage solution begins to fill, you may learn its limitations.

Their Concept

Your Reality

File Management (what you may be using now) relies on users to name and organize folders and files. In order to find a file, a user must:

1. Know and understand the folder structure that holds the files, AND
2. Know the methodology for naming files, AND
3. Know enough information to predict the actual filename, AND
4. Hope that all other users adhered to the same conventions when storing files

This method is fine if the only user is you – you know where you put files and how you named them. But as your organization grows and more users are involved and more file are created, the potential for human error – or simple misunderstanding – increases, and files become misplaced. This causes user frustration with the system and they look for ways to keep files on their desktops, and the problem snowballs.

Document Management (what we want to sell you) uses a central sever-based program to enforce where files are stored. A database is used that contains a record for each file stored. This record can contain as many fields as you like, such as client name, document date, document title, document type, and whatever else you deem important or useful for finding files. As a result, in order to find a file in a document management system, a user must:

1. Know just one of the pieces of information contained in the document record.

The server program uses the submitted information to locate the correct record, and the document associated with the record is retrieved and displayed on the user workstation – all in a second or two. Users no longer need to keep the complexity of the folder hierarchy and file naming scheme in mind when searching – they simply have to know one of the many items of information you have selected to index your documents – a much simpler and much faster task.

Mindwrap developed its first document management application for the Macintosh in 1988. Many vendors will offer you web-based document management solutions (either hosted or on premise), or incomplete solutions that offer simple file-and-folder based file management with poorly integrated document scanning.

Optix by Mindwrap is the only full-featured document management and workflow solution that runs natively on the Mac that offers the full range of high speed document scanning, drag-and-drop customizable indexing and retrieval using a real database manager, document management with full revision control, customizable security, and electronic workflow.

Our native Optix Workstation client for Macintosh is written from the ground up using the latest Cocoa APIs and XCode tools to provide a Mac OS X user experience second to none.

Your paper-based or file sharing solutions rely on your employees becoming their own file clerk. Filing documents consistently, locating documents as needed, all of which takes valuable time. As more documents are created by different authors and become harder to find, the problem is compounded as employees start squirreling away “extra” copies of files that lead to bloated file cabinets and hard drives.

With a Document Management system, documents are continuously available, accessible whenever needed (and as allowed by your security).

Compliance with folder and file naming conventions is offloaded to the central server, making user conformance a non-issue. Because users no longer need to remember folder structures and file naming schemes, and because any file can be found and viewed in seconds, users no longer have the system integrity concerns that accompanied their reliance on old File Management techniques.

The result is that – relieved of mundane file management duties – your users can focus on the goal at hand. Your team is more united. And because you freed up the time previously wasted on tracking down files, they can handle more work (but don’t tell them that).

As your firm has grown, you probably acquired several software applications and would like whatever Document Management system you select to integrate with your existing systems. Perhaps you have extensive data stored in a FileMaker Pro database – we can help you leverage that data. Do you receive important correspondence via email? Our integration allows users to selectively store and index emails directly to the server repository from within Apple Mail or Entourage.

Mindwrap’s technical team has decades of experience building highly integrated systems for both commercial and government clients, and we can help you analyze your existing systems and advise you on the best strategies for leveraging your legacy applications and data. You can read more about our system integration tools here.

You probably arrived on this page because your desktop and file server systems are Mac-based or you operate a mixed environment of Macs and PCs. Congratulations – your search is at an end. Since 1988, Optix by Mindwrap has been the premier name in Document Management and Workflow systems for the Mac and cross-platform environments. We have installed hundreds of systems worldwide that support thousands of users just like yours.

Our workstations both support native scan to PDF and TIFF using super-fast high-end Fujitsu scanners. Our system allows you to store desktop documents such as Microsoft Word and Excel using the same indexing criteria as scanned documents.

Have something you need to do that we haven’t mentioned? Our Mac client supports Applescript and our PC client supports COM, so they can integrate with your other desktop applications – ask us, we may have done it before.