Posts Tagged ‘AIIM’

Digital Signatures a Key for Microsoft SharePoint

Friday, July 1st, 2011

Microsoft SharePoint has become ubiquitous. I mean, who hasn’t heard of SharePoint? The multi-purpose document management platform is being used across industries for a whole host of workflow processes, such as project reports, staff claims, purchase requisitions, etc. And, as applications become more business-critical, processes – including those with legal implications – are finding their ways into SharePoint and creating the need for secure, legally-enforceable, and manageable automated signature capability.

Enter digital signatures for SharePoint – the tool that can enable SharePoint users to achieve fully electronic workflows through the approval stage. AIIM, the leading authority in document management and workflow automation, did a study called Digital Signatures for Document Management and SharePoint. As part of the study, AIIM asked 231 SharePoint users about their signature requirements within SharePoint. Here’s what they found:

To learn more about these findings and others, download the free AIIM study.

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Digitally Sign Time Back Into Your Hands

Friday, December 31st, 2010

Time is precious, right? We spend so much time trying to control time as best we can – whether we’re trying to make it pass more quickly (is it lunch time yet?), or save it, or get it back when it’s lost. When it comes to going paperless with digital signatures, cutting costs and ridding ourselves of burdensome processes like stapling, stamping, manually routing, scanning, and filing aren’t the only benefits we’re after. In most cases, cutting process times is of the essence.

In an AIIM study called Digital Signatures for Document Workflow and SharePoint, the leading authority in the field of document management and workflow automation asks 196 respondents who do not use digital signatures how much time is added to their workflows because of the need to obtain paper-based signature approvals. Here are the results:

For 68% of respondents, at least one day is added to process times solely because of the need to obtain paper-based authorizations. For 23% of respondents, the added time is an entire week on average. Think about those figures next time you’re wondering whether digital signatures could actually cut your process times and keep your business moving. How much time are paper-based approvals adding to your workflows?

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Digital Signatures Coming Soon to a Document Near You

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

If you’ve been following my blog, you may have noticed the occasional mentions of AIIM, the leading authority in the field of document management and workflow automation. In fact, just a few posts ago I discussed part of AIIM’s great research about the benefits of digital signatures. Today, I welcome you to feast your eyes on Digital Signatures – Coming Soon to a Document Near You, an interesting and resourceful article that was published in AIIM’s e-Doc Magazine.

The article opens with a short overview about what digital signatures are and why they’re needed. This follows with a brief discussion of key points to keep in mind when looking for a digital signature solution. If your organization employs an electronic content management (ECM) system, you might be interested in the section called “How will digital signatures fit in your ECM and Workflow solutions?” But regardless of whether or not you use an ECM, this article is full of useful information about digital signatures and how digital signature technology can reduce costs and expedite processes.

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Digitally Sign Away Your Printer Problems and Paper Jams

Friday, August 20th, 2010

In a previous post entitled “Are you in on the digital signature 4-1-1?” I shared a first-of-its-kind research called Digital Signatures for Document Workflow and SharePoint. The study, conducted by AIIM (a leading authority in the field of document management and workflow automation), revolves around the uses and benefits of digital signatures as perceived by non-users and as experienced by actual digital signature users. One of the areas AIIM explored was: of all the documents you print out, how many are printed solely for the purpose of obtaining signature approvals?

Considering the documents that are printed out as part of your formal approval processes, what proportion would you say are printed for the purpose of adding one or more signatures? (N=290 non-users)

As you can see from the results above, in 42% of organizations without digital signature solutions, three-quarters or more of printed documents are printed only for adding signatures. Imagine what not needing to print these documents could mean for these and similar organizations and their business processes – considering the price of paper and of routing documents to the appropriate signers, and adding that to the amount of time it takes employees to fulfill this process – that’s a heavy handful that digital signatures can completely eliminate. Download the AIIM study for free and find out how organizations use digital signatures to avoid this type of problem, and enjoy added benefits along the way.

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Are you in on the digital signature 4-1-1?

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

In this day and age, it’s customary to check out a product online before buying it, and user reviews tend to come in especially handy during this process. Indeed, getting the 4-1-1 on another person’s experience with a product or solution before adopting it for yourself may greatly impact your decision.

If you’re considering implementing digital signatures, you’d probably be interested in finding out what people who are (and aren’t) using them have to say about it. Fortunately, AIIM – a leading authority in the field of document management and workflow automation – has made it easy to get this information with their recent, first-of-its-kind research entitled Digital Signatures for Document Workflow and SharePoint. In surveying digital signature users and non-users alike, they report on the perceived and actual benefits of the digital signing technology, and inquire on topics like how prevalent formal signatures are in day-to-day business activities for organizations from various industries.

One question AIIM posed in the survey was: Would you say that more than 50% of the main business processes/documents in your organizational unit require formal signatures?

In the graph above, you can see that in the ‘Engineering & Construction’, and ‘Professional services, Legal and Media’ industries, a good amount of processes rely on obtaining signature approvals. What does this imply in terms of digital signatures? If you’d like to know, you can download AIIM’s study for free and find out. Enjoy!

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