To Paper or Not To Paper: Going Paperless With HowNow (part 7)
This article is one of a series of articles on going paperless with HowNow. To read the rest of the articles, head to the Paperless category.
Symptom: Version control is a nightmare
Documents are sometimes sent out without the proper QA checks having been performed – and you can’t stop this.
It can be hard to know which team members have been involved in the creation and quality assurance of documents. When errors are found in documents it can be a forensic exercise to find out where in the process things went wrong.
Version control is difficult. Emailing a document or spreadsheet to a colleague creates a copy (or copies) of it and before long, the ‘Which is the most up-to-date version?’ becomes difficult to track. Such version control problems might result in you losing your work. You might overwrite another’s changes. Ouch.
Solution
HowNow Document and Email Manager eliminates version control problems by allowing you to specify on a per team member basis who is allowed to approve and finalise documents, giving you an excellent level of QA control. It automatically creates an Audit Trail in the background, recording who created each document and when, who opened it, who reviewed it, who approved it, who finalised it, who printed it, who emailed it, and so on.
In the ‘Knowledge’ area of HowNow (which houses your procedures, policies and templates), your team members can only access the ‘Current Edition’ of each document. This gives them—and you—the assurance of knowing they are working off the approved and up-to-date version. In the ‘Records’ area of HowNow, version control problems cannot arise because only one person can edit a document at a time. When collaborating, you can email links to files instead of emailing around attachments. You’re all on the same page. Literally.
