If you’ve ever tried to collaboratively edit a document by attaching different versions of a document to an email chain, you probably aren’t anxious to repeat the experience. Confusion, conflicting versions, and miscommunication often plague the process. And don’t forget your downloads folder, which would likely contain something along the lines of “file.pdf,” “file2.pdf,” “file_final.pdf,” and “file_FINAL_final.pdf.” There must be a better way to do business.
Thankfully, a better solution exists! Using a document management system like M-Files can eliminate many of the difficulties that email attachments create. But before we consider the solution, let’s take a closer look at the problem.
5 Problems with Using Email Attachments
- Collaboration: With email attachments, if you want multiple people to be able to create, edit, or review one document, you’ll send one version out to everyone and receive as many copies back as people you sent it to. This can get very confusing very quickly and result in duplicated work if multiple people spot one error.
- Version control: This problem goes hand in hand with the difficulty of collaboration through attachments. It’s nearly impossible to keep track of every version of the document, and several people may end up with conflicting versions of one document.
- Organization: If your company relies on email attachments to store important documents, organization will quickly become a problem. Email search functions frequently lack adequate filtering tools, and they almost never take metadata into account. It’s important to be able to find the documents you’re looking for quickly, but that won’t happen through searching your inbox.
- Storage: This problem is straightforward—email inboxes have limited storage space, especially for large attachments. What happens when you run out of storage in your inbox? Documents may get deleted that should not have been deleted.
- Security: How many times have you received an unintended “reply all” email? How many times have you sent one? It’s easy to do. But this sort of error can have larger consequences than embarrassment if there’s a sensitive document somewhere in your email thread. What’s more, emails can easily be forwarded to anyone, and they will easily be able to open the document and read it.
M-Files to The Rescue!
A modern document management system like M-Files can solve all these problems, increasing your company’s efficiency and decreasing its costs.
- Collaboration: By maintaining one authoritative version of a document, M-Files allows multiple people to edit the document at the same time. No work is duplicated.
- Version control: Again, M-Files keeps only one version of each file. However, it also records a detailed version history, keeping track of any changes made as well as who made the changes and when they did so.
- Organization: By classifying documents based on what they are—not where they are stored—M-Files unites your company’s documents into one powerful search function. The AI-powered system can help assign and analyze metadata to help you find exactly what you’re looking for in seconds.
- Storage: While different versions of M-Files have different storage capacities, all include an on-premises volume of one million objects (documents).
- Security: M-Files has strict security measures in place throughout the system. In addition, you have complete control over who can see any given document through role-based access permissions.
Ready to Give Up Email Attachments for Good?
If you don’t ever want to wade through dozens or hundreds of email attachments again, look no further than M-Files. If you’d like to talk to the experts at Laminin about saving time and money by implementing M-Files in your company, contact us today.
