EASY Software’s Tony Cheung does some crystal ball gazing for the main content services issues we’re likely to see in the market

Automatic data form generation

User organisations who have yet to seriously plan their journey to cloud will need to quickly catch up. The good news here is that customers who have taken advantage of an EASY Cloud platform can rely on a Managed Service to take care of the Terabytes of corporate content that their staff rely upon.

Meanwhile, for those customers who still have an on-premises ECM solution, more and more hybrid offerings are scheduled which will utilise our latest Cloud-based technologies with the latest AI technologies for automatic data form generation, the almost up-to-date invoice extraction technologies, or embedded digital signature features.

Core processes have to be available for others to take action

The importance of centralised corporate information management has never been clearer, especially given the impact of managing through the lockdown. What we can be sure of: companies will continue to enhance/revise their current processes to use their ECM workflow platforms to avoid misplacing critical company information, yet gaining the transparency and visibility of what’s happening in real-time in their departments.

And until we battle COVID into submission, the impact of staff changes or absence due to illness will continue to be a concern. As a result, core processes have to be available for others to take action. When deployed in an optimal manner, time spent on management reports should also be replaced with dashboards of live information, we recommend, as this can quickly highlight any delays or critical tasks.

Getting back control

There has been an explosion of users relying on collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams (which came with their Office 365 subscriptions but which they didn’t really explore pre-pandemic), team collaboration on Google Docs, or the use of Salesforce for their customer related activities.

However, the lack of organised information management for key corporate documents in these new information channels will need to be addressed quickly, and before subscription costs spiral. EASY’s recently released Lightning enabled EASY Archive for Salesforce is a very efficient way for Salesforce users to upload documents more easily, for example, while also granting full-text search access to all customer related documents, but with significantly lower storage costs.

One of the main challenges for 2021 is already shaping up: companies battling to regain control over precious customer-related information across these increasingly popular platforms. An opportunity for thedmcollaborators community? I’m thinking—most definitely!

Tony is Managing Technical Director at EASY Software UK – Enterprise Content Management Solutions