Chris Bjorklund: You’re listening to the AllBusiness podcast. I’m Chris Bjorklund. If you’re getting this through iTunes and RSS feed or an online streaming-media player, you can hear interviews with other experts at AllBusiness.com.

Bjorklund: Are you having trouble keeping track of all the print and electronic documents floating your office? My guest today, Heinan Landa, president of Optimal Networks, is an expert on the latest document management systems. They are designed to help you organize everything from email to documents edited by a dozen different people. Landa has advanced degrees in electrical engineering and computer science and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business. Managing documents used to mean setting up folders and filing papers and it is really a lot different today, Heinan. What are all the types of documents that typical businesses trying to manage these days?

Heinan Landa: Well, yeah, we have moved away from just paper and most of the documents that people are dealing with and trying to manage are actually in electronic format so you are looking at the Microsoft Office documents, Word documents, Excel, PowerPoint, of course, PDF documents, and now, over the past couple of years, one of the biggest sources of information in businesses and documents is email. So now, email is really right in the center, dead center--considered a document too that people are trying to manage.

Bjorklund: Boy, that is a whole new way of thinking about it but having tried to search for something in the last few weeks, I can see what you are saying. It is just, it is getting out of control!

Landa: Yeah, it really is.

Bjorklund: Now, what about offices though that might have, I mean, some people still have paper files. Is there a way to kind of manage both at the same time in one place?

Landa: There are, you know, there are software programs that are called especially, you know, on the business level, they are called records management. Software packages? And what they do, if you are really in the business of taking documents and filing them, paper documents and filing them, they will let you organize all of that so that you can, you know, set up tags and bar codes on your document files and track where those documents are. Say you are a law firm and you have clients and you need to keep their documents for a few years. They can keep all that information in the database and that same database can be searched at the same time as all of your electronic documents. Another way to go about that on kind of a smaller scale, maybe not so intense is to get scanners and to actually scan in some of your documents that you would think you not only want to know where they are physically but also what is inside of them. And there are packages that when they scan the document, they will take a picture of that document and they will try to recognize the words inside the documents called OCR technology and both of those will go into the document management system so when you search through all your electronic documents, it also finds the matches of the physical documents that you have scanned in and brings up those pictures.

Bjorklund: So what is a document management system? What do you mean by that?

Landa: Well, fabulous question. The interesting thing about these documents whether they are PowerPoint or whether they are Word documents, is that it is all unstructured information. You know, anything could be inside of a Word document, it could be a, you know, a brief, a pleading, it could be a poem.

Bjorklund: Right.

Landa: Who knows? And so we do not really know what is inside of those things. So when we are trying to organize documents and we are trying to manage them, what we want to do is find a way to tag those unstructured documents with some little bit of structured information. And this is exactly what a document management system does. For every document, unstructured document that you put on your network, on your file server, it creates what you call a profile. And that profile could have some fields like who is the author and what is the name of the document? Is it for a client? Which client is it? If you are in a law firm, you know, is it for a specific matter? If you are not in a law firm, does it go under a specific project? All sorts of things and these are very specific fields, you know, database fields that you could fill up and it marries those two together. So then, when you are out there searching for certain documents, you can actually put in parameters. You can say, “Hey, give me all my documents for the Ford Motor Company.” And they will all pop right up. And that is probably the number one key to a document management system. Now, they do more. They do more, you know, because now they are letting you bring in emails as documents. They are really giving you one central place to organize all your documents and so suddenly, rather than a whole loose scattering of documents all over your network drive, you have got all of your documents in one repository and you can search through it. So all of your business know-how, all of your legal know-how, it all becomes like a big search of a database and in most cases, not only can you just search on those individual fields like clients, like matter, like create dates, you can also do a full text search. So it is almost like having Google right for your own company on your network.

Bjorklund: I would think sometimes even now when you do a Google search, it is, I do not know, there is an art to getting it narrow enough so that, you know, you do not get 500,000 results. So do these systems when you are planning them, help you with that? There are key words and you help actually structure that? You, the client?

Landa: Yes, yes, there--you can do that. In fact, you should do that and you should make the system and especially the filing system that you construct, you should make it really match the way you do business. A couple of my clients who use this type of system are law firms and so they structure their whole document management system almost like, you know, around the matters that they work on. And so, when they are filing a document, it is almost like filing in one of their folders. It is like here is the matter and here is the pleadings subfolder and you just plop it in there. So, certainly that helped but also one of the hugest competitions out there between the different document management systems is who can provide a better search engine. Right? Because you do not, you really do not want to go to Google and get 500,000 hits.

Bjorklund: That is right.

Landa: You really want to get it categorized one way or another.

Bjorklund: So what are the elements of a good system? Can you talk about that?

Landa: Yeah, I think the number one element of a good system is usability. It is a big word but if the folks in your company are going to use the system, forget it. It is not worth it. And that is probably the biggest complaint I have heard from people who have put in a document management system and it is not working for them.

Bjorklund: An expensive mistake, too.

Landa: A very expensive mistake. The key to usability is simplicity. So when I talk about this profile that you want to connect to an unstructured document, make it very, very small. Just a few fields would be fine, you know. Three, four, five, six maximum. You do not want to give people 21 fields to fill out every time they save a document and you know, so that is one element. Another element for a good system is that it needs to be mandatory. You cannot let people use loopholes to save the documents in other places or not categorize them. That is probably complaint #2 is that half the people in the company are using a document management system and the other half have found a way to circumvent it. So suddenly, you are not really searching through all your company documents. You are only searching through some. So, many times the way these programs work is they take the place of the file open and file save dialogues so when you go to Word or whatever package and you do file open, all of a sudden up comes the document management system. And when you do a file save, up comes the document management system unless you file the document. And that is really key because if you were to say, put together your own homegrown document management system and you did a whole structured filing on your network drive of structured filing system with folders and subfolders and all that kind of stuff, you really have no way to enforce it and make it mandatory. But if you use one of these systems, it does it for you. And then, the last point I will throw in here is for a good system, is it has got to manage your emails. Your emails are so key. You know, they are a point-to-point communication. If I send you Chris, if I send you an email, that is your email and no one else is going to see that email and so therefore, is it personal or is it really a business document? So if you are my client and you send me an email, I want that document to be available to everybody else working on your account. And a good document management system actually can work inside of Outlook or whatever email package you’re using and you can literally take the email and drag it into a folder that is really part of the document management system and suddenly, it is available for everyone else on the network and it is searchable and it is there for everyone to work with.

Bjorklund: Sounds easy enough.

Landa: If it is set up well…

Bjorklund: Right, right. Now let us say, how would the different kind of system a law firm would need, a document management system, how would it be different from let us say, I was a building contractor. Would they be looking at pretty different kinds of basic structure for their systems?

Landa: Yeah, you have to spend some time up-front on the design and implementation of a good document management system. Now remember with law firms, you know, their work product is a document. You know, that is what they produce whereas for a builder, a document helps them produce their final building or whatever it is they are doing. So you really have to go at it differently and a document management system for a law firm is clearly going to be very, very, very important since it is managing the ultimate product whereas for a builder, you might not want to spend as much money because it is perhaps a little bit more ancillary. So, yeah, you have to really go into it. You have to understand the work flow, you have to understand the, you know, the departments, the teams. So if you are in a law firm and one team does litigation and another does estate planning, you might want to have different file folders in a system for them versus a builder where really what they are trying to manage is their contracts.

Bjorklund: Heinan, with so many more people working remotely, does this--do document management software systems help with that, help you access documents from the web or from a Blackberry? How can that help?

Landa: Here is the beauty of it. Once you have got all your documents in one place, all of a sudden, they can be available. Much more available than they ever were, and think of how hard it is to get to your C drive if you are on vacation. If they are on the network server in one place and the software supports it, of course, you can see that they…you can log into the document management systems over the web. You can check out the documents from any web browser, work on them, and upload them again. You can, the top packages are letting you get your documents and literally do full searching and everything right from your Blackberry or your PDA and they are also letting you literally take the documents you need on your laptop, break away from the network, do your work, work on the airplane, do whatever you need to do, and then when you reconnect to the network, it will synchronize all the changes. So it can really work very effectively for remote users?

Bjorklund: Do these systems help you with guidelines for how long you should be keeping documents? I mean, are there reminders built into those systems that, oh, you can get rid of this stuff now. It has been seven years. There are lots of reasons you have to keep documents.

Landa: Yeah, probably one of the biggest that has come down the pike are all these rulings on e-discovery which is if you are involved in a lawsuit, and the court says, produce the document, you have to produce that document. It does not matter if it is on your server, on a backup tape, or on your mobile phone. You’ve got to find a way to produce that document and the only way to kind of combat this and not make it extremely onerous, is if you have in place a good-faith operating procedure for, in essence, deleting and destroying your documents after a certain period of time. And so, yeah, you can build that into most document management systems. They kind of take over the document life cycle from the creation of the document to all the way to the storing of it, all the way to, you know, the eventual demise of that document.

Bjorklund: I have to say, I have never really thought about the document management life cycle but I have read a little bit about that on your website and I just thought it was an interesting term that these documents have a life and it is recorded, you know, at the get go and at some point, it may be destroyed or not, but that it is tracked all along the way. It is like keeping a, you know, a photography book for your children from birth to when they get married.

Landa: Of course, if it is your kids, maybe they will pass it out from generation to generation…

Bjorklund: Right, right. What about work flow? How does a document management system help a small business with work flow?

Landa: Work flow is something that is a touch different from the actual document management because what you are doing at that point is you are taking the document and you are moving it perhaps through other people, for approval so you are really looking at a form, maybe you are moving it through people for approval and for them to add additional information. I have seen that most of the document management systems interface with some kind of a work flow package so they can actually do that and literally put reminders into your Outlook that you need to work on a particular document or approve a particular document. But if you are your typical small business, work flow may be overkill for me and what I am looking at is how can this thing make me more efficient? And really what it does is eliminate all this time spent searching for documents and it eliminates time spend on recreating documents that you cannot find. And it improves the quality, the overall quality of your documents because you are able to easily reuse parts of documents that you have done before. So I think those are probably the key things it does and I will throw in one more. When you are sending a document for review traditionally, let us say via email and let us send it to your co-worker, I mean, the proposals I write are fairly hefty, so you might be sending a, you know, 5 to 10 mb file for review to someone and they might be sending it along to someone else and it goes back and forth and it clutters up your email server and it, you know, because of the attachments that are so large, and it kind of bogs it down and I have seen, you know, client situations where the email services cannot handle it because they are sending these huge PowerPoints back and forth. One other thing the document management server does is it puts all that in one place and it lets us send around a link. And anyone who clicks on the link goes right back to the original document. So it can help in that respect.

Bjorklund: Oh, that is a great, great thing. We do that with audio files, so why not with large PowerPoint files?

Landa: Exactly.

Bjorklund: What about having several people work on this document. You were just touching on that and this has sort of spread it. When you post it somewhere and everybody has added, how do you keep track of everybody’s version of it or everybody’s editing of it?

Landa: And this is exactly what these systems are designed to do is they let you create new versions of the document and they also are very clear about who has got control of the document at any given time. So if I am working on a document and you try to open it, it is going to say, “Listen, thanks for trying Chris, but Heinan has got the document now and you’ve got to let--but if you want to open it and create a new version, feel free.” And it just makes this whole process much clearer so you do not have people, I do not know if it has ever happened to you, where two lawyers or two businesspeople are sitting and working on the same early version of a document and then you have no way to kind of process their changes together. So the system really kind of helps with those sorts of things and it gives you a full audit trail of how a document came into being so you can see who printed it, who edited it, who checked it out, who emailed it, the works.

Bjorklund: We cannot do a program on this topic without talking about what is it is going to cost. Do you have any guidelines along those lines so that people that are maybe for the first time looking into this will not be in any kind of sticker shock? They have to kind of know what the costs are and what they are for?

Landa: Yeah, there is sticker shock. It is a, you know, it is a fairly robust technology that people are putting in and you are looking at software life consists of maybe between $300 and $500 per person in your organization and it is really something you want to do for everyone who is using documents and you also have to consider that you want to put in usually a server, a dedicated server to that sort of thing so that might be another $5000 or $10,000. I would say a good rule of thumb, I hate to throw this out but better to be prepared and have it be less. A good rule of thumb might be between $600 and $1000 per person to have a whole system put in and implemented.

Bjorklund: You said you were talking about efficiencies earlier. Do some companies looking at these systems try to figure out, well how soon am I going to recover some type of return on my investment?

Landa: It is a tough case to make because it is very different for each organization. You know, I go back to the difference between a law firm and a building contractor. For a law firm, this is their work product. So if they are not putting out the very best work product, is their competition going to eat them alive? Because the competition has a document management system and they do not? I do not even know how you calculate an ROI on that sort of thing. But you can also calculate how much time is wasted with people searching for documents or in some firms I have gone to, everybody when they want to find a document, they start emailing around the whole firm. You know, they send out like a broadcast email that says, “Hey, I know I worked on this case, you know, two years ago. Does anyone know where the brief I filed or whatever?” And you see emails flying back and forth wasting everybody’s time. People working on wrong versions, all that kind of stuff but it is really calculated in labor hours. You know, in people hours and it is calculated in terms of a competitive edge and in terms of the marketplace because another thing that you can do with these systems is share files with your clients. If you want, you kind of open them up into the process to let them review documents right on your system and if your competitors are doing that and you are not, what is that costing you in terms of business?

Bjorklund: Yeah.

Landa: It is a good question but it is hard to put a number on it.

Bjorklund: And you have not touched on something like disaster recovery and some of the legal issues that come up with some of the new federal laws and I suppose there is lots of reasons why people not only should a, you know, have a system for keeping track of their documents being able to retrieve them but also, you know, to know exactly what is them and where they are?

Landa: Yeah and it goes back to this idea of all the documents being in one place. Because if they are all in one place and they are all in a server, if you can bring that server up in the case of a disaster, you know all your documents are safe. If you are backing up that server, you are backing up your documents as well. And there are all sorts of, I mean, you know, disaster recovery is a whole huge topic unto itself but there is all sorts of technologies out there that will let you recover from a disaster. If you do not know where your documents are or if they are scattered across everybody’s PC in your company, forget it. You know, you could bring back up your servers and not be back in business.

Bjorklund: What I want to wrap with is maybe some of your thoughts for people that, if you can remember, I mean, it is probably hard for you to put yourself in someone’s shoes that is just looking at this for the first time because you are such an expert in your field. But if you were coaching someone on what are the three most important questions to ask if you were talking to some suppliers of document management systems and software? What would they be? Two or three questions.

Landa: Well you are too kind to flatter me as an expert but if I was looking at this from scratch, I would first really want to see what the program looked like. I know that that is not a question but for me to see how easy it is to use is probably key. I would also want to know their status in the marketplace. One thing about being a small or medium-sized business is that we cannot be guinea pigs. We do not have the kind of money that huge Fortune 500 companies have to, you know, beta test products. So we really want to try to go with industry leaders as much as we can and the third question I would ask right up front is “Is this in my budget?” Because it is an expensive solution and I have got to see a return for it.

Bjorklund: Excellent! I enjoyed talking to you and thanks for joining us on the AllBusiness podcast.

Landa: Absolutely my pleasure!

Bjorklund: Today’s featured expert, Heinan Landa is founder and president of Optimal Networks, a company which provides technical expertise and document management to small and medium-size businesses. I’m Chris Bjorklund, thanks for listening to this AllBusiness podcast.