Application Integration: A Sweet Blend of Comfort and Improvement

So you’ve decided your department could benefit from a document management solution, but not everyone is embracing the change.  Big surprise, right?

Try reading through your Facebook feed next time Facebook changes its site design (spoiler alert: everyone’s outraged). Or think about how weird it feels to use someone else’s phone or car, and you can’t figure out where anything is! Change is awkward, often hard, and rarely popular at first.  No one wants to learn a whole new interface and leave the comfort of their familiar programs. That’s where the beauty of a seamless integration comes in. Enterprise content management (ECM) solutions are actually designed to work with your current applications so you can keep using the software you’re already used to while getting the most out of investments you’ve already made.

One of the great things about an ECM integration is that it works with pretty much anything you want it to. Many times, this can be achieved in just hours without having to build a custom code.  This way, your business apps can update without affecting your ECM, and you can access all kinds of useful tools straight from your familiar programs.

Our ECM has great workflow integrations with email services (Microsoft Outlook’s in particular is fantastic), Microsoft Office products and SharePoint as well. Emails and any corresponding documents or files can be imported into your ECM and automatically categorized and organized, and the same can be done with Office and SharePoint.

In addition to Office and email integrations like the ones mentioned above, ECM also offers enterprise application integration solutions so you can leverage your current ERP. For a list of common ERP integrations, click here.

All this may be good and well, but what if you need to extend some of the functions of your ECM to external systems? Simple: You can share your solutions through the internet with customers, constituents, clients, business partners, and the like to increase transparency into your processes or provide easy access to forms or documents. This way, everyone has the same source of information with just a few clicks of the mouse.

A good integration makes the burden of change a little easier to bear, and hopefully when everyone sees the new way is better, they’ll get on board too. Want to learn more about how you can benefit from ECM? Download our E-guide below!