If yours is like most human services agencies, you’ve generated – and continue to generate – a huge amount of non-case-related paper every year. Each department, from the Board of Directors to Finance, HR and Administration, has its own output of meeting minutes, handouts and agendas, reports, monthly statements, forms, correspondence and more. It’s not surprising that most agencies are buried in paper, much of which is often stored off-site, or at least out of sight.

If you’re using valuable space to store all your archives, and doubting whether you could find any specific piece of information if you had to, it’s time to consider SHAREWORKS, a secure and paperless alternative. It’s both a scanning tool and a centralized document library, a digital repository for all of the documents outside of your agency’s case structure. Like SCANWORKS, it not only reduces paper but also restores usefulness to old documents by making them once again retrievable and searchable in their new digital format.

 

 

Unlike other scanning solutions, our SHAREWORKS document library is built right into CASEWORKS, so you can access both case- and non-case-related documents from the very same centralized portal. There’s no need to create a separate, parallel storage server just for non-case documents.

With SHAREWORKS you have the ability to scan documents at any time, whether they’re recent or years old. In addition to these scanned images, you can also upload live documents, like Word and text files, into the same system.

Think of SHAREWORKS as your agency’s own document portal – the central repository of documents that can be accessed by anyone with the proper permissions, from anywhere, via the Internet. Without such centralized storage, chances are that your many documents are currently being stored in multiple locations – in or on various local drives, servers, filing cabinets and storage rooms.

Any person that has permission can scan individual documents into SHAREWORKS folders at any time. You also have a Bulk Scanning tool if you want to scan a large batch of documents into the system at once.

You can create folders and sub-folders within the SHAREWORKS system to keep all of your files organized and findable. Each department in your agency can store all of its important documents in its own special folders, stored by whichever types and categories it defines. Whether it’s a vacation request, a Ministry submission form, or a template-based document, you can define a reliable place for it.

SHAREWORKS is a sophisticated system that also includes various optional controls. For example, you can turn on the ability to show the history of a document, so you can see multiple versions of it. You can also put annotations right on the scanned image, and add redactions to cover sensitive passages. SHAREWORKS also includes Version Control and the ability to lock any open documents to prevent simultaneous editing errors.

As part of your overall system, SHAREWORKS documents are subject to the same security safeguards that you use for case-related documents. You can set permissions on a document by document basis, store and see versions of a document, see signed documents, and even restrict full drives and directories to certain people. SHAREWORKS’ role-based security lets you create custom roles that have specific read or write permissions. You can also build special roles to include whatever documents you want, and fine-tune access per document and per folder.

Because it’s integrated with CASEWORKS, your scanned documents can also have special workflow actions assigned to them, so that when a document gets saved or signed, for example, it can generate a new task to ensure proper follow-up after a certain period of time.

 

Whether you’re storing all that paper at your own facility or renting additional storage space off-site, you’ll free up valuable space when you convert your paper to electronic format.

Another advantage of digital archiving is that it’s easy to duplicate your records if you need a reliable backup of all of your data. Paper records offer no such easy option – lose a sheet and it’s usually gone for good.

By applying OCR (optical character recognition) to your scanned documents, you can add the valuable ability to search them by keywords. It can be very beneficial and efficient to have this whole backlog of dusty documents become suddenly searchable!

By organizing all of your documents in secure folders on your centralized portal, you’ll no longer have difficulty retrieving historical documents whenever you need to look up something.

Easy collaboration is a key benefit that comes with SHAREWORKS’ centralized approach – it give you the ability to share documents from different workers and locations easily, rather than having to set up special sharing permissions for each individual file and folder in Windows.