More and more of our customers are asking us to help them provide employees with remote access to documents. This requirement is driven by a number of factors. Many of our customers are growing and opening new offices. And others have home-based and remote office-based employees. They need for these workers at the remote offices to have access to customer documents. Medical offices with multiple offices need to be able to access patient charts from any branch office that the patient might walk into. A financial services advisor needs to be able to look up client documents remotely from the client’s office. Branch managers at various types of companies need to be able to route invoices electronically for approval to the home office accounting department, an accounting firm wants to allow their clients to access their tax documents via a secure portal.
The common thread that runs through all of these remote document access applications is control. The medical office needs to control access to patient records due to HIPAA regulations, the financial advisor needs to meet SEC or FINRA compliance for all document storage, the home office needs to control spending by implementing an AP approval process, the accounting firm needs to make sure a client only has access to their files.
So putting documents on a shared drive and providing remote access to the server is not a viable solution to provide your workers with remote access to documents. This approach lacks control. Consider the example of the accounting firm. They want a customer to log in to a secure system preferably via the web so they can retrieve, view and print out documents. This requires a document management system with rights management to control each user’s access rights down to the document level and a web browser-based application made available to the CPA’s clients.
Think of the benefits of this type of system. If you gave customers access to their documents via a web browser and your employees added documents via the document management application in the main office, the documents would be automatically available to the customer. No more phone calls, no more phone tag – no more looking up documents and faxing or emailing them. This approach makes both parties far more efficient – which is the name of the game in today’s economy.
To help you navigate the key considerations for bringing remote document access to your business, Jon Clark has recently written a paper on remote access which is available at http://www.cabinetng.com/white-papers/remote_access.php .
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