We lose important information for many reasons, often due to issues that we do not consider in our electronic documentation management processes. I’m sharing some points that I think we should consider:

1. Build a work process and support it through an electronic documentation management policy. Most information losses can generally be prevented. These sometimes start with a failure in the data management process or the lack thereof.

I once spoke with a very successful manager of a company, and he told me: “Documents do not belong to the end user. The information is of and for the company, therefore the end user must follow the guidelines we create or face the consequences of not following them.”

It sounds dictatorial to some extent; however, this gentleman managed to create a culture of responsibility in relation to the management of his organization’s documents, managing to convey the value of these to his employees.

Basically, the creation, presentation, and correct understanding of the process by employees, added to a clear document management policy in the organization, establish the basis of security at the documentation level.

2. Use an antivirus When they contact us to recover documents, a common factor apart from the lack of information backups is the lack of an antivirus on the end user’s computer. This includes Apple computers (MacOS system). Yes, ladies and gentlemen, these computers are not “immune” to the viruses that circulate on the Internet. As for which antivirus to use, there are many good products on the market. One of my favorites is Kaspersky, as it provides protection on its EndPoint platform at a centralized level, allowing the creation of protection policies at the business level. It also provides us with alternatives such as Kaspersky Security for Microsoft Office 365, which allows us to connect with Microsoft Office 365, so that protection starts with the documents before they reach the user and even in their Cloud system.

3. Use an application to synchronize your employees’ files in the cloud

We have plenty of alternatives: OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, among others. I personally use OneDrive for my business documents, both those I manage on a daily basis and those shared with employees. The important thing at this point is to always save the information in the folder assigned for this application, so that the system will synchronize the data and we will be sure to have a backup in real time.

4. Centralize your company’s information in a secure location

Centralizing documentation in a secure site for sharing documents is key to the correct application of documentation management processes, policy compliance, and audits.

By centralizing information and creating folders by department, we ensure that employees will work more fluidly with their team members and at the same time we begin to create a culture of documentation management in the organization.

The users themselves will request that the data be saved on the shared site so that they can work or follow up on requests, presentations, proposals, financial statements, among other documents.

5. Assign access permissions to documents

This is a bit more technical, but it will be easy for your technology provider to understand. All you need to provide is a directory of documents that you want in your business and indicate which users or departments can access them.

As easy as the following example:

Who has access? Finance team or “Juanito X”

Define the type of permission. Read, Write, View, or Full Control

What directory structure do you want?

– Finances

– Reports

– Financial Statements

For this type of structure, I use Microsoft SharePoint, as it integrates very easily with Windows and even with MacOS.

A little tip: Do not use long names for the files. There are people who want to describe the entire content of the file in the title of the file. Be brief when naming a document. Believe me, because of a long name I have seen users have difficulties recovering those documents from their backup system.

6. Configure audits

Request that your provider configure rules and audits to control the management of documentation.

Example:

The finance team can send emails outside the organization, but I want it to be recorded every time they send a financial report to an email outside our organization.

7. Use passwords (almost obvious) and two-factor authentication

In relation to passwords, you can’t imagine how many people configure their passwords with information about their pets, family members, or date of birth, or as easy as deducing that it is the password they use for everything.

I recommend two-factor authentication. Most systems ask you for this configuration and on many occasions we “click” on the “remember me later” or “skip” option.

It is important that we take some time to configure this alternative that will help us avoid many losses of information, thefts, scams, or other problems. This will help us know when someone unauthorized is trying to use our applications or access our information.

I hope these 7 tips are very useful to you. If you want to know more about it, you can request more information from this WhatsApp