Taxonomy doesn’t have to be taxing

Needle in a haystack

Today, more than ever, we are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data we are expected to sift through in order to find what we need. Research shows that information workers spend more than 2.5 hours per day just looking for information to help them do their jobs.

Document Management systems like SharePoint are supposed to help alleviate this problem by making information searchable and offering it on screen. However, that only works if your documents are searchable (whilst remembering images are not) and your taxonomy must be spot on and consistent. By that I mean each time you upload a document to SharePoint, you can add extra information like a title or a description to help staff find or navigate to these documents later on. But, let’s be honest, that’s not going to happen unless an automated process does it every time.

I’ve been tagged

That’s where metadata comes into its own. I like to explain metadata as a tag that provides extra information to help categorize and describe a document. These carefully defined tags which get applied automatically and consistently every time you deliver or capture documents, make the job of finding these documents again within the electronic archive so much easier.

Not only does metadata help suitably permissioned staff discover documents again, but document workflows can also be triggered. If a specific metadata tag is present on a document and other conditions are met, then conditional workflows can be created that move documents to other libraries, alert you and others of new content, or follow pretty much any business process.

I’m ok I’ve got Zetadocs

Zetadocs makes it really easy for NAV users to see all documents related to a NAV record ‘in context’ using the Documents FactBox, but what about those people in your organization who could benefit from collaborating with these documents, but don’t have access to NAV?

Take the example of a customer services assistant. They need to be able to let the customer they have on the phone know if their order has been confirmed. They fire up their browser, point it at their SharePoint site and type the customer’s order number or even just the customer’s name into the search box. Bingo! They’ve found the related documents. Then, through using a combination of these related documents and their associated metadata, they can give an informed answer without having to transfer the call to someone with access to NAV.

Configure or code

Each edition of Zetadocs for NAV supports metadata tagging. Zetadocs Express gives you simple metadata like the NAV record number and the organization name. Our Essentials editions give you configurable metadata, enabling your partner to take any field on the associated NAV record and upload that, along with the document, without writing a line of code. More complex scenarios like combining fields from another line of business system are possible, but this requires coding to accomplish using our Zetadocs Plus editions.

Two simple steps

It’s really easy to set up additional metadata with our Essentials editions. First, create the additional fields in SharePoint, then use the Zetadocs Metadata Mappings table in NAV to define which NAV fields you want to pull data from, and then you’re ready to push these fields into SharePoint*. This short document explains these steps in more detail.

You’ve already got the power

The most powerful aspect here is the ability to give access to documents, normally held just in finance, to other suitably permissioned employees; typically non-NAV users.

You already own Zetadocs Express if your BREP is current. That may well be enough for your needs, but if you have more complex requirements, be sure to visit our Zetadocs family overview to see what each of the editions offers.

* Please note that adding additional metadata is only supported when using SharePoint archiving due to its ability to display and search on these metadata tags.