Document Management Goes Mobile

With the recent explosion in mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, more businesses have been seeing employees using their devices for work purposes. A white paper by AIIM shows that using mobile devices in document management systems has been getting more popular as well, with 35 percent of organizations adopting enterprise document management solutions that enable remote access to data.

The AIIM report says employees are accessing company email the most through their mobile devices, with just over 40 percent reading company email via apps. About 20 percent of employees said they use their mobile devices for instant messaging, just under 20 percent said looking at social business content and under 10 percent to access document management content. Document management becomes much more popular when factoring in mobile website access, with almost 20 percent of people using a mobile web page to look at document management affirmation.

“The boundaries of today’s organizations are more fluid than ever before – we collaborate with an expanded ecosystem of partners, vendors and customers, and we need to be able to do this whether we’re in the office, at home, or on-the-go,” Aaron Levie writes on AIIM’s website. “This loosely defined, increasingly mobile workforce is made possible by rich, enabling technologies such as near-ubiquitous internet access, sophisticated mobile devices, and web-based, interconnected software platforms that connect people to their content, contacts and tools regardless of location.”

Levie said there are now more things that companies can do with a mobile device in business than ever, including content management, CRM and sales management, collaboration, and document editing on the go. All of this can go a long way to helping businesses become much more efficient.

The AIIM white paper also said more document management systems than ever are providing mobile access mechanism, with the most popular being standard browser interface on about 60 percent of document management systems. Just under 30 percent of respondents said they access data through a mobile-access web interface, about 15 percent with an iPhone app, another 10 or so with an iPad optimized app and just under 10 percent with an Android app.