If your company is considering investing in electronic document management software (EDMS), you may feel a little overwhelmed by all the options available. Not only do you need to find the best product to meet your functional and budgetary requirements, but you also probably need to find the product that best fits with your IT infrastructure. Traditionally, document management software is purchased and then installed and implemented on a company’s servers and workstations. In recent years, a few document management companies have begun to offer hosted (Software as a Service – SaaS) document management software where your documents reside on a server external to your facility and you access the system via the internet
There are 5 key areas you should consider before selecting what type of solution to deploy in your organization.
Financial – what are the short-term and long term costs associated with the two approaches? In simplest terms, internal solutions require a bigger upfront investment while SaaS costs are typically spread out over time with monthly payments. Of course the SaaS costs may seem like they would be much higher than internal costs over time, but considerations must be made for IT time spent maintaining the server and providing backups. These costs can be incremental if your IT department is already maintaining a group of servers, or they may be major if you aren’t setup to handle the ongoing maintenance.
Deployment – what are the steps taken to get the systems up and running for your business? One of the bigger advantages for SaaS is the ability to get the software up and running very quickly, as opposed to a longer path for internal deployments, particularly if new hardware is needed.
Integration – what are the capabilities (or maybe limitations) of SaaS vs. Internal? It is important that you think about how you want your document management system to integrate with other applications that you use in your business today. In general, it is easier to integrate software programs that are deployed on the same network, so the internal approach gives you some advantages if you are looking for strong integration with software that you already have running internally.
Security – are there security differences between the two approaches? There are security differences between the two approaches. If your documents are stored on a local server, then it’s a relatively simple matter to secure access to the server and limit the ability of people to do things to the server. However if you don’t have a good IT person in charge of your security there is the potential for security breaches. If you adopt a SaaS solution you are basically entrusting your provider to ensure the security of their solution is adequate to protect your data. This should be an important consideration in your selection criteria. On the vendor’s side, it’s in their best interests to provide a secure solution as they would be out of business rather quickly if they do not approach this in a professional manner.
IT Philosophy – does your company embrace internal solutions or are you going “virtual”? For some companies this is an easy decision. Either they have all internal software or everything is in the cloud. For these companies the decision is simple and they just have to find the vendor who best meets their needs. For other companies that use a mix of SaaS and internal systems, the decision is more complicated and may depend entirely on the feature set of the available products and how they match the needs of the organization
Jon Clark has written a whitepaper providing more detail on this subject:
http://www.cabinetng.com/white-papers/internal_v_hosted.php
