Mastering the flood of information - the EMA® feature "Department archives/Document Linkage".

When many employees work together, there are often just as many systems of order. With EMA you can create order and transparency immediately or after the fact. In the process, it is not yet necessary to determine at the beginning which structures will actually be needed later in practice. EMA is flexible and adapts to your needs.

File formation - creating order by linking documents

By linking documents, "digital file folders" can be created. All documents of an activity are grouped under one identifier, for example the customer number.

Working comfort is significantly improved. Linking works across all sources supported by EMA: connect e-mail communications to SAP data, scanned dockets, printed invoices, and even important recorded phone calls. All documents stored in EMA in an audit-proof manner can also be subsequently supplemented, structured and expanded with new information.

For example, a practical, pragmatic contract management solution can be set up quickly and without downtime without the overhead of an expensive document management system. Employees can work in their familiar e-mail client. This saves costs and still ensures relaxed working.

With "linking", each employee basically only sees the e-mails and documents for which he or she is also authorized in the e-mail client and on the company's file server.

Department archives - a tool for true teams

When employees in a department work on tasks together, it is useful if information is not only visible to one person, but to the entire team. For this, the "Department Archives" feature offers the perfect solution.

Documents can be individually assigned to an authorized group. Access is per document: one or more department archives are stored as attribute values. A group of employees is given access to a department archive and can thus see all the documents concerned. Each employee can determine whether a document or e-mail is important to everyone and ensure that information is distributed properly within the team. For example, applications can be shared in the deparment archive "HR", or invoices in the department archive "Accounting".

The department archive attribute does not necessarily have to be set individually for each document. It can also be assigned automatically: via rules during archiving, via folder synchronization directly from Outlook, or as part of EMA workflows and attribute rule sets.

If you also have the EMA feature "Active Directory Groups", the administration of the department archive group is very easy. EMA then retrieves the information about the members of the department archive from the central directory service, the company's Active Directory, for each request. EMA covers many other special cases for highly sensitive data in this context, for example various job change scenarios.

Technical background

The feature department archives differs in functionality from regular delegation regulations and mailbox access in that documents can be assigned individually to an department archive - a user group - and not just globally, as is usual, for example, with a vacation substitute. However, the assignment of the department archives attribute can also be automated or partially automated, e.g. when the document is stored in an e-mail folder or hotfolder on a file server.

The department archive feature in the price list contains the functionality for file creation/linking. Customers who have already licensed the Department Archives feature have the Linking feature since Update 6.07.

In the administration interface of EMA in the Enterprise Attribute Editor it is possible to assign the function "Linking" to one or more arbitrary attributes. This could be, for example, the attribute customer number. One conceivable workflow would be for the customer number to be captured automatically during import into EMA using the "Scan to Archive®" module. Scan to Archive enables targeted indexing for digital or paper documents. All e-mails and documents belonging to this customer number are now immediately present and in direct access when calling the viewer after finding only one document, without having to search again. Order comes into the system and that with only very few steps done by the administrators.

If several attributes are marked as linking attributes, a deeper organizational structure can also be created, for example if customer number and project number are marked as linking attributes. A customer may have many ongoing projects, a search will then provide the user with a structured overview of all customer projects. In EMA's own e-mail and document viewer, one can thus track references on multiple axes and dimensions at any time, navigate back and forth, and see all relevant information immediately.