Document collaboration software for small and medium companies

What is document collaboration software and how it is used? Such software allows a group of people in different areas to share and manage documentation simultaneously. The typical objects that can be managed with a help of that tool is the documents which content information is interesting and important for members of workgroup such as common project documentation, budget and financial documents, technical literature and other documents which should be collaboratively edited and reviewed. First of all in order to arrange documents collaboration you should digitize all documents that you need to be shared. Then you should find proper document collaboration system. Any collaboration tool works on the nearly same principle - cooperation among users is carried out through the server.All transactions are performed via such a server which bonds all users into one team. That software works as a documentation repository (database) that enables project team members to find, edit, review and copy information from electronic documents.

Most powerful samples can provide you with capabilities such as documents versions management (tracking, restoring), tracking and limiting users access to documents, tags management, search for keywords in documents content and many other functions. You can find in the Internet a lot of web-based docs collaboration solutions. Such an online service can be a good solution for virtual project teams, but for companies that want to create corporate service any online solutions are not sensible, because of potential problems with Internet access and with security of remotely located document collaboration server.

Integrate documents collaboration with business process, project and workflow management. Often, systems that help to control how people work together (collaborative project management tools) can also support docs and files. Such a solution may be not as powerful as special software, but it has other advantages. In this case your project management software works also as a tool that allows sharing, monitoring and measuring documents-related processes, makes it easy to track document statuses and to manage documentation in task-oriented manner. 

The good sample of such project system is VIP Task Manage that allows project team members to attach documents (files or links) to tasks, so in order to arrange collaboration users should do just a few clicks to add a document to certain task and grant appropriate permissions to partners. VIP Task Manager enables to establish corporate document collaboration service that is directly connected with content of company projects. Owing to possibility to upload document to database as a file (in this case changes cannot be applied to file) you can create list of documents that can be read-only. With a help of VIP Task Manager you can organize project and business documentation library. Owing to access rights system of VIP Task Manage you can allow or restrict users to see some tasks and documents - this helps to keep a proper level of confidentiality. 

Read also a new article about process management - project management client-server software for Windows