HealthGate Articles

Product Highlight: Collaboration Architect Document Management

When it comes to document management, have you or your colleagues ever asked:

• Where are we going to store our documents?
• How can we best organize our documents?
• How can we easily locate documents after they have been stored?
• How can we archive previous versions?
• How can we secure documents and ensure only authorized access?
• When multiple people need to work on a single document, how can we best manage the process?
• When a document is finalized, what is the easiest way to distribute it?

Assuming that you’ve asked or have been asked these questions, Collaboration Architect offers the answer. Collaboration Architect’s document management features solve challenges related to document storage, retrieval, security, creation, modification, versioning and distribution—all in a single application.

Creating, storing and organizing documents

Creating and storing documents within Collaboration Architect is quick and easy. Use the New Document feature (see Figure 1) to create a document from scratch with the option of associating it with a specific template, or import an existing document by uploading it to the application at the click of a button. As part of the creation process, select where within the application you would like your document to be stored.

Figure 1

Locating documents

You can easily locate documents stored in the application by searching via keyword, type, topic or status. Another quick way to locate a stored document is to sort and filter the document list, also by type, topic or status.

Archiving previous document versions

Once a document has been created within or loaded to the application, it remains there and can be accessed via the Document Version History feature (see Figure 2). All modifications and comments associated with a document are recorded. Once a workgroup has completed the review and update of a particular document and that document has been approved and released, a new version is created and the old version is archived on the system. Options exist for viewing previous versions, comparing two versions of the same document, and rolling back to previous a version.

Figure 2

Securing documents

Collaboration Architect is a permissions-based application. This means, only those with permission to view specific features and documents can do so. The level of access associated with each user is set during account setup within the Add User feature (see Figure 3).

Figure 3

Modifying documents (team workflow)

Collaboration Architect makes it easy for project teams to work on the same document. Because the application is Web-based, it allows for access from any location at any time. All documents are stored centrally within the application for easy access, and based on permissions, multiple team members can add comments, make edits and provide approvals. Such comments, edits and approvals are immediately visible to other team members accessing the document—saving valuable project time by eliminating the need to send documents back and forth via email, and eliminating the potential for an outdated version of a document to be worked on by a team member.

Distributing documents

Documents can easily be exported from the Collaboration Architect application to any number of external systems by downloading as HTML, Word or PDF formats.