eFile Management

Bringing order into chaos

eFile Management is the core of OpenWorkdesk. It helps organizing content in a way users need it in order to work efficiently. Via configuration, tailor-made eFiles for the different departments in the enterprise can be created. Via the role management of OpenWorkdesk, they are made available to the users of the respective departments.

eFile Management with OpenWorkdesk

Virtual and semi-virtual folders group documents according to business needs regardless of the structure in the underlying ECM system. It is even possible to display documents from different ECM systems in the same eFile. For example, you can have a customer eFile that shows the different versions of a contract residing in IBM FileNet P8 in one folder and outgoing invoices stored in IBM Content Manager on Demand in another folder. For the user the difference in location does not matter. The cover sheet of the eFile shows the most important properties at a glance, e.g. customer number and name or even the payment status retrieved from an ERP system.

Important documents or folders are brought to attention of the user via highlighting them in the hit lists according to configurable rules. For example, all documents with a due day in two weeks are highlighted yellow and the ones overdue are highlighted red.
Via drag & drop the user can easily add one or more documents to an eFile and is supported indexing them by different features of OpenWorkdesk. E.g., it is possible to pre-populate some index values based on the target folder, let’s say the customer or contract number, or to inherit index values from one document in a batch to the other ones or even store a whole batch with the same set of indices at once. Custom pages for indexing can be defined according to the document class and thus make it easy to work even on a large list of indices. The automatic display of documents as soon as they are added (even on a second monitor) is another feature that saves clicks and time.

Adding documents via drag & drop

Creation of new eFiles is as easy as that. By clicking on a button OpenWorkdesk creates a complete predefined folder structure, e.g. an HR dossier with all relevant sub folders. There is no ambiguity or possibility to miss something. If needed OpenWorkdesk can create a unique ID and assign it to the newly created eFile. Alternatively an ID can be retrieved from another backend system. Tasks can be assigned both to documents and folders and all tasks associated to an eFile or the documents contained in can be listed.

The combination of all these features together with the powerful role management provide a very effective transformation from the raw technical view of the documents residing in one ore more ECM systems to a business oriented view that helps the users to accomplish their day-to-day tasks in a very efficient manner. The eFile Management of OpenWorkdesk can be used to set up simple folder applications as well as simple document routing applications to start with up to complex solutions for contract management or the distribution of incoming mail.