Portal tools provide a single entry point into multiple data repositories for document imaging. Portals can handle document auditing, document security, approval routing, categorization, searching, web discussions about documents, and threaded discussions. Portals present an intuitive interface to end-users, whether inside or outside of the organization, to help them be more productive. Users can access links to business systems, content, processes, and documents, facilitating internal and external web-based self-service.

Properly designed portals build web self-service freeing staff from costly interruptions to answer routine questions or provide routine documentation.

Organizations depend on the data output of a variety of mainframe and other host computer systems. Typically, back-office applications (e.g., billing, human resources, finance and accounting, sales, inventory management and distribution) generate output in the form of internal reports, bills and statements.

CDMS’s enterprise report management experts strategically connect this back-office information for use in the front-office environment to support business decisions, content management systems, e-billing systems and e-commerce initiatives. These enterprise report management systems can provide new views of and create new reports from existing reports’ content elements. This can sometimes be a less-expensive alternative to data warehousing or provide “normalized clean” data records to a data warehouse. CDMS consultants were pioneers in the development of enterprise report management technologies and can help your organization understand the value of its many uses.

This burgeoning technology gives users the ability to set access rights on email and electronic documents—even faxes—to protect them even when they leave the organization. The length of time that a document is available and the ability to forward, copy, print or edit a document (or data therein) can be controlled by enterprise rights management technology, which can safeguard documents and prevent theft of intellectual property.