Document collaboration

Most organizations still operate within a once-successful Windows-Office-Email (WOE!) paradigm. Employees create, store, browse, and access documents in folders on their computers. The documents move around between people as email attachment. While this paradigm has the advantage of “familiarity”, it also has serious shortcomings:

• Finding the Single Source of Truth (the correct document version) is often a problem. Versions are created due to feedback received from multiple reviewers at different times, and conflicting review comments.
• Maintaining folder structures requires discipline; failure results in chaos. The current version of a document may reside in the Inbox or on a local drive (where an email attachment was saved and edited).
• Group authoring of content is not facilitated. Reviewing and merging documents created by multiple authors is time-consuming and error-prone.
• Over-reliance on email for document exchange leads to “inbox flooding” – email overload causes disruption and may lead to possible omissions. Email does not link to a document, but sends a copy. Copies tend to further aggravate versioning issues.
• Folders and email lack advanced metadata capabilities and are not effective when searching for, pulling, or receiving information from others.

How Qontext Helps

Qontext’s advanced document collaboration features enable you to:

• Collaborate on documents in a secure, central, online environment using the edit-in-place feature. Avoid proliferation of document versions on multiple local drives and inboxes. File locking prevents overwriting during editing
• Use the annotate feature (coming soon) to mark-up and add comments in (and about) a document, even when you do not have access to Office software
• Search even within documents using its powerful metadata capabilities