Guide to Document Management with HyperOffice

Lesson 1: Plan out your groups before inviting users to join the system

This is one of those pitfalls I mentioned before that should be avoided at all costs. When I set up my clients account I didn't create multiple groups and simply let everyone start uploading files into a single directory structure. Although I had spent a great deal of time setting up an intelligently designed directory structure, I soon realized that it would be wiser to have a group for every department in the organization. It was a slightly painful process to make that transition since it required re-educating quite a few of our employees to put documents in a new place but doing so radically simplified the permissions required for the groups and even helped maintain a more segmented and organized file system.

I recommend: 
Setting up groups that correspond to the way your organization is segmented. In our case we used departments (Sales, Marketing, Accounting, etc.) and it worked out very well.

I also seriously recommend setting up permissions immediately. HyperOffice allows you to control permissions at a folder OR a file level. Make sure to set up folder permissions to ensure that you can protect the necessary files.

Finally, use the Hyperoffice help system... it really is a wealth of knowledge and provides detailed information about how to use the permissions, versioning, file locking, etc... I even sent links of their training videos to key users within my organization.

Lesson 2: Educate your users early on

Anytime you deploy any sort of new technology in an organization, educating the users is critical. In my case, the application was launched in stages and I spent a great deal of time training the department heads on how to use the system. My training was thorough and well documented (with a little help from the HyperOffice staff in that department) and the department heads were able to use the system quite well. Unfortunately they were responsible for rolling it out to their staff which was done with varying degrees of success. Below are some very simple tricks that can make a deployment much easier... once I started doing these things the rollout was a breeze.

I recommend: 
1) Make sure every user sets up their "hyperdrive" immediately... this is the Hyperoffice term for web folder which allows a user to have drag and drop access to their files directly from windows. Some of the people in my organization didn't know about this feature and complained about the way the system worked. Once it was setup they all quickly fell in love with it.

2) Teach your group admins (in my case department heads) about versioning. Versioning tells Hyperoffice to keep copies of a document at all stages of its life cycle... you can essentially go back in time to view a file as it was before a certain change was made. Once I taught people about this many headaches disappeared.

3) Show admins the recycle bin. Although it is only accessible to administrators this feature is a real lifesaver in some situations.

4) Send an email to all of your users with best practices... including setting up document change notifications, commenting and using document locking to prevent conflicts.

Lesson 3: Pre-populate your folders with important documents

User adoption is key to any successful rollout and getting users to start using a new tool can be difficult. Fortunately document management systems give you a simple way to kick start the process. Simply put some important documents in the system and then let everyone know that the only was to get to them is to use it.

I recommend: 
1) Add key documents to each group and send out an email letting users know how to get to them.

2) Add some comments to these documents and encourage the users to respond to you when you send the email.

3) Use the audit feature to check and see who has uploaded a new version or locked the file for viewing (word does this automatically when you use the hyperdrive). This feature is a very useful feature for tracking activity on a document or finding out who deleted a key file.

4) Remember to turn on versioning for these files so users can see how that works.

5) Encourage users to check out BOTH the web interface and the hyperdrive since they have different benefits.

Lesson 4: Turn off extraneous Hyperoffice modules to keep it simple for your users

Although I know that some people may be using some of the other Hyperoffice features, I recommend that anyone that is using the system solely for document management turn off some of the extraneous Hyperoffice sections. I found it to be much easier to explain 1 feature (document management) to my users and I am fairly certain that having unused features showing in the interface will be more of a hindrance than is necessary since it is easy to change the system to show only what you think is essential.

I recommend: 
1) Use Hyperoffice profiles (found in the portal administration section) to turn on only the modules that you want a user to see.

2) Think about setting a users landing page to the documents section of the group they go to the most. Since you can create multiple profiles you can have a different one for each department.