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: Most of us struggle to stay organized at work especially with all the electronic communication ranging from emails and PowerPoint presentations to Excel spreadsheets along with regular paper documents. A document management system may be the answer. According to Heinan Landa, founder and president of Optimal Networks. Here’s what he says you want in a good system.

Heinan Landa: The number one element of a good system is its usability. It’s a big word but if the folks in your company aren’t going to use the system, forget it. It’s not worth it and that is probably the biggest complaint I have heard from people who’ve put in a document management system and it’s 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 don’t want to give people 21 fields to fill out every time they save a document and you know, so that’s one element. Another element for a good system is that it needs to be mandatory. You can’t let people use loopholes to save the documents in other places or not categorize them. That’s 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’re not really searching through all your company documents. You’re 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’s 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’ll throw in here is for a good system, is it’s got to manage your emails. Your emails are so key. You know, there are point to point communication. If I send you Chris, if I send you an email, that’s 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’re 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’s available for everyone else on the network and it’s searchable and it’s there for everyone to work with.

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 business. I’m Chris Bjorklund, thanks for listening to this AllBusiness podcast.