Why Shareflex ECM Online for Microsoft 365? Because we know your Microsoft 365 can do more!
In the second part of our blog series we focus on the strategy behind Shareflex and its positioning in the ECM environment. In addition, we will explain why the DMS market needs a solution like Shareflex and what the benefits are for both customers and sales partners.
2024-02-07 – Frank von Orlikowski
In the first part of our blog series “Because we know your Microsoft 365 can do more”, we explained the difference between traditional DMS/ECM systems and Microsoft 365. We took a look at the market, which has been established for more than 30 years, with the various vendors, compared the architectures and the operation of the systems, and gave a first insight into the DMS possibilities of Microsoft 365. We also addressed some common myths that still persist in the DMS and ECM industry. In the following, let’s look at the strategy behind Shareflex and how the product suite fits into the ECM environment.
The market for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) or Document Management Systems (DMS) has been around for more than 30 years and has always been about more or less the same things: File and document management, ERP and CRM integration, audit-proof archiving, contract management, invoice processing, document control, incoming mail processing, transaction processing, document creation via clauses or templates and much more.
Organisations typically choose a DMS system when they need to:
Technological developments and new challenges, such as the pandemic or the increasing threat from hackers, mean that new topics are constantly being added. These include, for example:
As a result, the demands placed on DMS and ECM systems have increased significantly in recent years – and so have the demands placed on product vendors.
Not least thanks to Microsoft 365, more and more new, exciting features and cloud operations are becoming a “must-have” requirement that many decision-makers in companies pay attention to when selecting systems and do not want to miss as part of their modernisation and transformation.
Many of these DMS requirements are covered by Microsoft 365 by default. The global distribution, multitude of apps, features and connectors, incredible market presence, provision of a trusted cloud platform and commitment to GDPR compliance have made Microsoft 365 an integral part of many organisations’ daily lives.
Microsoft 365 describes itself as the world’s most powerful Content AI Platform. Every day, more than 1.6 billion documents (as of June 2023) are stored in Microsoft 365, and therefore SharePoint Online, by tens of millions of users. Microsoft 365 offers a cloud platform that covers almost everything, from document creation and editing to email management, collaboration, process automation, reporting, comprehensive AI support, and individual extensibility and customisation. In addition, all data and documents are stored securely and compliantly in the Microsoft cloud. Microsoft 365 is therefore a powerful content AI platform that, with the right configuration and customisation, can meet a wide range of an organisation’s DMS requirements.
What it lacks, however, are out-of-the-box, quick-to-deploy solutions for document-centric business processes such as file management, contract management, document control or invoice processing.
With Microsoft 365, Microsoft offers a comprehensive content AI platform – but no ready-made and quickly deployable solutions.
This is exactly where the Shareflex ECM Online solution suite comes in. To illustrate this, let’s take a short trip into the world of document-centric business processes:
Document-centric applications such as contract management require a scalable application server, a database and storage for legally compliant document storage in the backend. They also need Office integration for document creation and collaboration, the ability to share these documents with colleagues or external stakeholders, and an engine for delivering management reports. AI support is also finding its way into contracts departments, for example, to automatically classify and extract a contract’s key metadata or to check content, such as contract risks.
The highlight: Microsoft 365 already offers all these features as standard, and as a Microsoft customer you are already paying for them!
And Shareflex builds on precisely this infrastructure. With Shareflex, you get out-of-the-box and quickly deployable document-centric solutions that seamlessly integrate into the existing Microsoft 365 environment:
In addition, the Shareflex solutions can be easily extended at any time:
The solution engine: The Shareflex add-onsAll Shareflex solutions are based on the so-called Shareflex Add-ons – also known as the Shareflex “Solution Engine”. Each Shareflex solution is pre-configured on the basis of the add-ons and can be deployed in the customer’s Microsoft 365 environment via the “Provisioning” module.
In addition, the Shareflex solutions can also be adapted to the respective – sometimes individual – requirements of the specialist departments using the no-code or low-code method with the help of the add-ons.
Together with Shareflex ECM Online, Microsoft 365 becomes an efficient platform for document-centric business processes. And this at significantly lower overall costs compared to traditional DMS or ECM providers. So now there is finally a real alternative for all those who think forwards and not backwards and want to bring their company efficiently, flexibly and securely into the future. We are happy to help you with this, please contact us!
Hamburg, 27 February 2024
Author: Frank von Orlikowski
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