Documentum or Alfresco – Use of Related Folders

One of the items our Documentum and Alfresco customers constantly struggle with is setting up their folder taxonomy in such a way that the taxonomy minimizes the requirement to jump between folders or open up search screens when performing a specific task within a folder.  One of the very successful additions to our High Performance Interface – HPI is the “related folders” function.  This post will describe how related folders, particularly as part of a case management solution, can improve user performance and reduce user frustration.  Screen cam example is located in our Learning Zone.

What is the business problem driving related folders?

Typical Documentum or Alfresco implementations group documents into a folder related to a task or business process.  Folder types examples across industries could include:

• Insurance – Policy or Claim folders
• Finance – Accounts Payable or Accounts Receivable
• Human Resources – Employee
• Legal – Contract,  Matter or Audit/Compliance
• Real Estate – Project or Lease
• Healthcare – Patient

Many times when processing a document related activity in one of the above folders, users will need access to supporting documents “owned” by other departments.

Scenarios for this type of access include:

• Claims processing for insurance would like to easily access older claims by the same policy holder as well as the related policy documents owned by the Policy issuance department.
• Accounts Payable might like to reference original Contracts to determine if the invoice is valid.

In the above examples, users would like to stay within the folder/case while quickly access the documents in other folders.  In a typical Documentum or Alfresco interface, the user would have to either

1. Initiate a search – leave the current folder to search – view the search results – potentially refine the search – open the folder to read the document and then return to the original case folder.
2. Navigate to another folder – leave the current folder – select the related department cabinet and navigate to the appropriate folder to read the documents and then return to the original case folder.

High Performance Interface – Related folders

The High Performance Interface (HPI) provides a dymanic way to avoid searching or navigating to related folders.   Every folder has the ability to display a “related” folders based on folder properties.  The related folders are dynamic created based on queries to quickly display folders in a “read only” mode.  Related folders allow the user to continue working in the case folder but quickly access related folders with only a mouse click rather than having to close the view of a folder to look in another folder.

HPI also provides for dual or even multiple screen viewing of documents to allow for users to quickly find and access documents.

Summary

Users can be frustrated by having to constantly search or navigate to find related document content.   Each application or group might have their own way of organizing content for efficient document/case/business processing.  Dynamic related folders allows the system to support more than one folder taxonomy by allowing users to view related content with losing context of their current folder or having to search/navigate to other documents.

To see the following in a screencam format, access our HPI Related Folders demonstration in the Learning Zone.