Integrated Document Management (IDM) technology is facilitating customer service. IDM provides companies with unified access to all forms of unstructured information across the enterprise.
Customer service has become a much-touted catch phrase, as it is now the primary source of competitive advantage in business. Customer interaction involves documents of many types - fax, paper forms, e-mail, system-generated invoices and form letters - and providing top quality service to customers requires access to all of these.
Tower Technology, represented locally by SPL - part of the Dimension Data Group, has developed an IDM system which supports high-performance imaging, computer output to laser disk (COLD), electronic document management, and workflow in production business solutions. This while simultaneously providing ad hoc foldering, advanced search and retrieval, and revisable content management to knowledge workers throughout the enterprise.
IDM replaces both Production Imaging and Electronic Document Management (EDM), formerly segmented systems. Production Imaging dealt with workflow processing and archiving huge volumes of paper documents, usually in a single-site back-office environment. EDM dealt with organising and controlling electronically generated documents, distributing access to knowledge workers across the enterprise.
Tower`s IDM system does not just provide object type independence at the desktop. The system combines the throughput scalability and mass storage capabilities of imaging systems, the WAN distributed architectures and revisable content management of EDM systems, and the collaborative work management features of modern enterprise messaging platforms like Microsoft Exchange.
The Tower IDM system is tightly integrated with the standard Microsoft messaging infrastructure and desktop environment, including Windows, Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, and Outlook.
Since most IDM business solutions involve workflow, the Tower IDM system is tightly integrated with production workflow from vendor Staffware, also represented in South Africa by SPL. In addition, Tower provides an application building environment, pre-built Staffware templates, and methodology geared to rapid development and deployment of workflow solutions.
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