Customer stories (Read Previous Blog) like this are so heartening. As someone who works largely ‘behind the scenes’ I am always curious about how the technology we build plays out in the ‘real world’ outside our labs and offices. After getting the above feedback from our customer, my team and I sat down to dissect what features and functions had proved most useful to him. Here is the list we came up with for what a good EDMS should do/help the user do:

• Plan and schedule the documents required for a project.
• Define the process to be followed for creating and reviewing the documents through workflows.
• Define the roles of people who need to create, review and approve each type of documents.
• Define a standard distribution list for each type of document at each stage in the workflow.
• Define duration between stages in the workflow or plan dates of key stages in the workflow (milestone) for monitoring.
• Define weightages for each document and for the key milestones in the workflow, to automatically generate the S-curves.
• Specify the budgeted time for different resources for the creation and review of the documents. 
• Handle commenting, capture all comments, and create a comment resolution sheet and maintaining the history of the comments.
• Handle commenting of 3D models and its workflow.
• Extract comments from the PDF drawings and produce a comment resolution sheet automatically.
• Maintain a complete audit trail of all the documents that are transacted through the workflow.
• Maintain all version and revision history of all documents and ensure only access to the latest document.
• Define the control access to the document based on document type or based on the project.
• Define standard document template in word or excel.
• Create digitals form information that can be captures as data and analyzed.
• Define all the related documents that need to be provided along with the main document for submission.
• Automatically control the access to edit, view, comment, etc. based on the role assigned and workflow. 
• Automatically notify the resource identified on their upcoming and delayed task.
• Define escalations in case of slippage of any milestone.
• Generate automatic dashboards and reports on the documents.
• Generate resource-based reports on their planned and actual time spend on documents.
• Generate quality-based reports on the documents.
• Capture all correspondences in a project and can store, track and monitor them online.
• 250+ types of documents can be viewed, commented and their version and revisions can be handled.
• Print QR code on all hard copies and can be validated through a mobile app to ensure the user only uses the latest documents.
• Archive all the documents with revisions history.

I’m happy that the features we built, some of them controversial or deemed unnecessary and ‘overkill’ at the time, have since proved so useful to our customers. It is a validation that our philosophy of designing digital project management solutions (integrated, lean, agile, need-based) is the right one for this market at this time. But technology is ever-evolving, so we are continuously working to streamline  and update our product.

Onward and upward!