How Schools and Universities Can Benefit From Using a Document Management System

Every academic institution from public schools to universities need to be able to store their documents securely. Many schools work with hundreds to thousands of kids each year. Managing such a huge volume of documents can be time-consuming and potentially disorganized. Solely using physical storage has a wide array or risks and potential drawbacks. Because of that, we recommend switching over to a document management system. Educational institutions stand to see plenty of benefits for using one.

What is a Document Management System?

A Document Management System (DMS) is a system used to easily track, manage and store document. Many of these DMS solutions are built using the SharePoint document library. There are many general benefits to using a SharePoint document management system. Using one:

In this blog, we’ll be discussing several ways the schools and universities can benefit from using a document management system.

Increased Security

Using a document management system allows you to safeguard all your school’s important documents including research materials, lesson plans, and student information. While authorized users can easily access necessary data, unauthorized users are restricted from doing so. Using a DMS in your institution allows you to track who has accessed a document, which documents were viewed, and what edits have been made to them. Documents can be traced easily, allowing you to create automated alerts in the event of unauthorized access.

Easy Access to Important Information

Using a SharePoint document library, you can open new ways to work with and exchange information between students, teachers, and other types of faculty. Ph.D. students relay on DMS to improve the effectiveness and competence of their research projects and to share documents among faculty, students and other researchers. Using an effective document management system can massively reduce the amount of time it takes to find relevant information and use it for research. Everything is organized and sorted, meaning you don’t have to go searching through large piles of documents in order to find the specific information you need.

Saves Time

Time is something of a rare commodity in many educational institutions. Time is an especially rare resource for students. Finding the best information for a topic quickly can be exceptionally difficult with older methods of document organization. With a document management system, your students, staff, and faculties can easily access whatever documents they may need, regardless of where they are. The SharePoint document library can be accessed from anywhere, even if they need to access it on their home computers, laptops, and even phones. Because of this, you can grab information on the fly as your walking around or eating dinner. A DMS makes it so documents are effectively organized and indexed – making finding the right documents quick and simple.

Lower Costs

Schools must balance a lot of expenses, and with decreased funding for schools all across the nation, the thought of taking on additional expenses can be distasteful. In schools and universities, the conventional way of documenting information in large files and binders costs a pretty penny and occupies a lot of space. According several studies, it costs more money to find a misfiled document and to reproduce a lost document than filing a document. To lessen the cost of this, implementing a document management system in educational institutions can bring about cost and space-saving solutions. A perfect DMS platform will help reduce or even eliminate many of the costs of physical document storage – leaving only the overhead costs of using the SharePoint document library.

Effective Document Backups

When a physical document is destroyed, it’s gone forever. Losing and misplacing documents can cause mess especially in educational intuitions where thousands of student’s records and administration files are being supervised. Using a document management system, documents can be easily traced and tracked, unlike paper documents that need to be shelved and require long-term document protection and preservation. With DMS, documents are less likely to be misfiled, and if so, they are easier to locate with cross-indexing. Further, regular backups are stored in the cloud, making it so that if something is accidentally deleted or lost, it can be reclaimed easily.

Environmentally Friendly

With many people feeling very concerned over the current state of the environment, many students are calling on their schools to switch to more "green," environmentally-friendly practices. Using a document management system, your school will be able to massively cut down on the amount of paper that you use. Additionally, since everything is done using Microsoft's cloud servers, you won't have to use extra electricity hosting servers. The only energy you'll need is the electricity necessary to power your computers.

These are just some of the reasons that schools and universities can benefit from using a SharePoint based document management system. If you think that the above benefits are worth making the switch, you should get started today!