Why Kernex Edocs
Business has become knowledge intensive. A significant portion of this knowledge is distributed in paper form (printed memos, reports newsletters, program brochures, etc.), both internally and externally. This explains in large part why globally, business spending on document technologies will top over $72 billion by 2006. This is a significant increase over the approximately $17.5 billion that was spent in 1999.

This large outlay will address many specific purposes, yet a consistent objective throughout is

 Physical Plant Costs
  Additional office space for production and storage
  Furniture (filing cabinets, shelves)
  Reproduction Equipment

 Administrative Costs
  Explicit distribution costs (mailroom & postage)
  Corporate administration costs (HR and procurement of the above)
  Individual productivity loss (organizing, filing, retrieval)

 Other Considerations / Estimates
  Over 1 billion paper documents are created each day
  The cost of a four-drawer filing cabinet can reach $2000 per year
  The average office worker spends 40-50% of their day looking for files
  Microsoft estimates that they saved $40 million in the first 12 months after   switching from paper based forms.

Typically organizations use shared network drives and/or exchanging working draft of new documents back and forth by attachment to email. Problems that occur in either of these scenarios are numerous:

Security - most often shared drives/folders are left unprotected by not requiring a password. This allows employees outside the workgroup unnecessary access to the files. If a password is implemented it allows access to all documents in the folder. Email is less secure - once mailed, any control of the document is lost.

Revision history - there is no revision tracking available using a shared drive/folder, which ultimately leads to using naming conventions to identify different versions.

Naming convention - with users left to their own imaginations naming files, those names become cryptic, and lack meaning to anyone but the author.

Name collision - vast amounts of work are lost due to an early version overwriting a later copy.

Document relationships - shared drives and folders have no provision for maintaining relationships between documents (for instance if you were to break a large project into pieces using different files).

How EDOCS Addresses Operation Problems:

Security - EDOCS provides sophisticated yet easy to use security allowing access to be set in the range of a complete repository down to one document. This access can be granted to individuals and groups. Users need nothing more than their password to access the system.

Revision history - Users check-in and check-out files from the repository. The document status (availability or possession) is apparent to all. When a user initiates the check-in process, its revision history is updated reflecting the updated number as well as date/time. Users can call up a prior revision at any time.

Naming convention & Name collision - use of different file names is unnecessary, EDOCS maintains the revision history, and guards against files being overwritten. The number of revisions kept per document can be set per installation.

Document relationships - EDOCS provides electronic "stapling" of related docs. A document detail sheet provides a list of all related documents, regardless of location within the system.

Routing & email - A great strength of EDOCS is its ability to notify users when documents need their attention. All system users have an "In Box" folder. When a document is ready for review, the author can easily route the document to this person/group's "In Box" who in turn will receive email notifying them of this action. Users can also "subscribe" to documents and get automatically notified by the system every time that document is updated. For users outside the system, EDOCS easily integrates with existing email (SMTP) systems.

Savings of Network bandwidth - Because EDOCS works from a central SQL based document repository, documents are delivered on demand, not automatically. This features alone represents substantial savings to the enterprise in the form of network bandwidth. If users routinely attach documents to emails, a decrease in traffic of up to 25% may be realized when converting to a link-based system.