Best Practices

If the various departments on campus were entirely self-contained, never having to share information with, or seek it out from, other departments, then a paper-based, hardcopy system might not be so unwieldy. But as anyone in education will tell you, no department is an island. Instead, there’s a massive amount of back and forth; a reality that a paper-based system is increasingly ill-suited for, says Linda Ding, education program strategist for Laserfiche.

Mobile technology has certainly made life more convenient, allowing employees to work and stay connected from almost anywhere. At the same time, because these devices are so portable and are often used by accessing public wireless Internet, they’ve made life a little less secure.

College and university records administrators are increasingly under the gun to meet regulatory and compliance mandates pertaining to document retention and security. This would be no big deal if they just had to track and control a couple of documents (and if these documents were all pretty much the same) but of course, this is hardly the case.

It's all very well and good to talk about the need to do more with less—as if this necessity has escaped anyone's attention these days. But how exactly do you achieve this objective in an efficient, rational (and humane) manner? Increasingly, one way organizations are streamlining and gaining efficiencies is through integrating siloed IT systems, eliminating the time-consuming practice of jumping between multiple applications. And when it comes to integration, using enterprise content management (ECM) as integrative middleware offers profound advantages.