Web-Based Document Management Improves How Teams Work Together

I work with my colleague Jody on pretty well everything, and we share many of our documents. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, except that she works from home much of the time and can’t access any of my documents as I change them.

We work with Credenza Pro, and each time we use it we’re discovering more about what a great solution it is for us. What I discovered the other day is that we don’t have to email our drafts back and forth to each other anymore. Rather than multiple email attachments, we just save our documents to the files we are working on in Credenza. It’s a lot easier. And, since we’re using Credenza Pro, we save all our shared documents as web documents. I’ll explain why that is so helpful.

In general there are three places you can store your documents in Credenza Pro – on your own PC, on your firm’s server, or on the web. The one that I like the best is the third option, and now Jody and I store all of our shared documents as web documents.  For Credenza this means that the latest Microsoft technologies are used to store the documents on a Windows Azure™ “cloud” server with 256-bit encryption, and it’s super-secure. But for me it just means that everything that I put there is safe, and I never have to worry about them. They’re even backed up for me, so no matter what happens to my computer, I know my documents are available and secure.

One of the best things about sharing documents on the web is that you can have the most recent version regardless of who last edited them or where each member of your team is located. You can access shared documents from a laptop while you’re on the road, collaborate with other professionals who are located in different states, or stay updated on documents that many different users are working on right in the same office. As long as you have an Internet connection, it’s easy to stay updated with your group’s latest projects using Credenza Pro’s web-based document management feature.

Storing all of our documents on the web has really improved how we work together. We both have access to all of our files, and even if we’re working on the same file we know that we’re both going to be updated with the latest version all of the time, no matter who has worked on it. For me this means that I never have to worry that anyone’s changes have been missed.

There’s another little tip that I just discovered today. It’s incredibly easy to save my documents as Credenza web documents, right from inside Microsoft Word. In its “Save” dialog, Word has a list of your “Favorite” places that you save documents. Credenza’s Web Documents appear there as a Favorite – and your full list of client/matter files is available, so you can choose exactly the file to save it to. So right from the standard Word Save dialog you can organize your documents, and make them available online to everyone you’re working with. It really couldn’t be any easier than that.