Content and document management is an important component in most enterprises, even in small business and not-for-profits. When an organization outgrows a shared folder or Google Drive, there are a wide range of options available for document management, and each option comes with benefits and drawbacks.
Some of the oldest document management systems are literally "off the shelf", in that they are software packages that install directly onto a file server and/or individual workstations. Some open source document management software uses the same model. In many cases, these products do not use a cloud service, meaning that high availability and redundancy are not realistic, and backups are an additional challenge to solve.
However, most organizations today are not using these older products, or are actively migrating away from them. In their place, the most common solution is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product for document management, whether that means an industry-specific system such as IManage Work for legal services and MasterControl for manufacturing, or a tool that is more cross-industry, such as Box.com or Microsoft Sharepoint.
Of course, any tool comes with benefits and drawbacks, with aspects like price, feature-sets, and integrations being major factors in the usefullness of a specific tool for a specific organization. In addition, a cost-effective and feature-rich tool may falter when it comes to a clunky or inefficient user interface.
Here are some of the trade-offs that can be found when evaluating any enterprise content management or document management software:
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Data Control, Data Security, and Data Residency
Software that runs as a multi-tenant cloud product is not likely to be fully accessible to the organization, and security will be under the purview of the vendor and not the client, which could increase the risk of data breaches or ransomware; it also might not be hosted in an acceptable region based on compliance regulations for specific industries or localities.
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Regulatory Compliance:
As with data residency, regulations may result in the some vendors being non-compliant. Compliance for some laws such as GDPR require actions to be taken to remove personal data, which may not be feasible for some products.
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Customization and Integrations:
Some products will have customization options, possibly with increased costs; in many cases, this customization is centered around branding and not functionality. Very few products offer full customization of functionality, workflows, and interfaces, and those that do (such as Sharepoint) may not offer a level of customization that is considered cost-effective to create and maintain.
In addition, some organizations require additional functionality, workflows, and interfaces, such as creating a proprietary mobile application, and most customizable document management systems do not offer the headless API-first functionality required for full customization.
Another aspect that is even rarer is access to the actual source code of the product for review and customization by the organization or by consultants chosen by the organization.
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Cost:
Many products that offer a more robust feature set, with advanced functionality like document control, intelligent document processing, and anti-malware protection, are often cost-prohibitive for many organizations. This is due not only to the higher cost of enterprise software in general, but in the case of products running in the vendor's cloud account or data center, there is often an infrastructure cost estimated on top of licensing costs, usually calculated against the more expensive use cases to ensure the median customer is not only below that estimated usage, but low enough to provide some profit from that usage calculation.
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Maintenance and Support:
With a SaaS solution, the provider is generally responsible for maintaining the software, applying updates, and providing support; while this can reduce the burden on the organization's internal IT and engineering teams, this also removes some flexibility on scheduling these updates. For some organizations, updates at a specific time of day may cause more interruption than the vendor might expect. As well, there may be cases where an organization may wish to delay a non-essential update for days, weeks, or even months; a good example is tax preparation, where in the United States there are two months of the year where tax deadlines for corporations and individuals make any maintenance windows or risk of unexpected results from an update may be considered unacceptable.
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Scalability:
Some SaaS products may offer upgrades as scaling limits are reached, while others may reach a ceiling on performance. In some cases, multi-tenant SaaS products may see performance issues based on other customers' usage affecting shared resources, with no easy path to resolution.
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Implementation Time:
For products that do require some additional functionality, integrations, or customizations, the time it takes to implement these requirements may vary widely based on the nature of both the product and the additions. While SaaS software was made popular in part due to the instantaneous onboarding, where a user or entire organization could start using a product almost immediately, for products and/or customers that require more complex setup and onboarding or customization, this implementation time could vary widely.
It's possible that the implementation time could be unknown, depending on the amount of discovery that is possible before the product is chosen and the contract is signed.
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Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity:
Most SaaS products do not specify how their architecture and organizational makeup can support disaster recovery and business continuity. And even if that information can be collected, there is likely no way of improving on their model if your organization, industry, or customers require it.
You are usually stuck with whatever level of high availability and contingency planning the vendor has chosen.
FormKiQ's flexible document management platform stands separate from other content and document management systems by being fully customizable, fully integratable, and fully under your organization's control.
Contact us to discuss how FormKiQ can provide the same benefits of an off-the-shelf software or SaaS without sacrificing flexibility and control.