Real Estate Document Management with SharePoint

By Russell M. Angelo 3 years ago

The real estate agencies have to deal with a lot of documentation which besides being an important job, it is also a tough job to do. SharePoint is an online digital platform to store and share documents with security. It saves you from a lot of hassle of finding required documents when needed from huge cabinets of paperwork gets rid managing space to store them in your office and putting extra cabinets. 

SharePoint real estate solutions include document management and customer relationship management. It also has a lot of other tools to help your business and enhance the workability of the specific tasks necessary to perform a project. Carrying out document management with SharePoint is a project with many possibilities and potential to address any requirement, process or model, in any company or organization as complex as it may be, it is also true that in 80% of cases it ends up being resolved simply with advanced document and file management in a set of document libraries within SharePoint.

However, even in the simplest case, we have seen it solved too many times according to the folder model within the document library, as the usual file-system file storage scheme, is only a little more advanced.

The following paragraphs analyze, in a simplified way, the two ways of taking advantage of a document library for simple document management:

Document libraries (based on attributes) for document management

A documentary library is like a database of files but qualified by multiple attributes (columns) totally flexible, which quickly derives in a large amount of associated functionality.

  • The documentary library  qualified by multiple attributes (such as client, person, creator user, modifier user, modification date, relevant, last associated activity in another related system, …) allows you to filter, order, classify and navigate through multiple views and configurations.
  • All Office documents directly share the indexing of the document library. The classification values can be managed both from the Office application (word, excel, PowerPoint, etc.) and from the SharePoint site, bidirectionally.
  • Also, if we work with the std or enterprise version (instead of the Foundation) we have the possibility of using managed corporate metadata (business taxonomies)
  • A qualified documentary library implies different ways of accessing, ordering, filtering and displaying information to different users.
  • In versions higher than SharePoint Foundation, it also allows you to present any view or document on another site of another department or on the intranet home page, for example, or intervene in the processes and flows of other sites, departments or corporate applications.
  • It also allows us to extract subsets and views of documents for different uses within the site.

As the most relevant documents for me or for the entire organization, designer (or preferably NINTEX ) workflows have more processing power as there are more attributes on to base business rules.

Document libraries (based on folders) for document management

A very simple option, close to the traditional use of files and documents, is to use the Explorer view option of a SharePoint library. This allows it to be understood as one more (virtual) directory on the network (with its equivalent folder tree and subfolders).

The copy/move/delete operations are equivalent to the usual file system operations, only supported by a DB instead of the file system.

This allows a translation of any file folder structure to a SharePoint document library directly (with a manual, but very simple, folder-by-folder migration)

Comparison of document organization models in SharePoint

By Attributes

  • New Document Management features available out-of-the-box
  • Possibility to apply business rules, workflows and ad-hoc parameterization for the needs of each area, department, and solution.
  • Integration of document attributes between Office applications and SharePoint site.
  • On the contrary, the management model usually supposes an important change in the handling of users.

By Folders

  • Agile
  • Simplicity and continuity for the user
  • We continue to have the same management capacity and functionality as when we had the documents in a filesystem folder tree, only with greater versatility in access.

In addition, both models share other functionalities such as exporting to Excel (to keep an inventory), publishing RSS (to find out about the latest publications), a powerful security management based on roles, and the possibility of extending the model at any moment, the sending of personalized alerts at the library or document level, etc.

Also Read About: Revamp Traditional Business Processes with Innovative Custom SharePoint Development Services

Conclusion:

Document management is an important thing in every business, especially the real estate business is all about documentation. The SharePoint consulting firm advise strongly to secure your data and important documentation with this online platform with ease of sharing them with clients and keeping them in a secure place. SharePoint has a lot of tools for providing real estate solutions for better productivity and saving time with document management.Al Rafay Consulting is an expert team of SharePoint development services providers who will be glad to guide and help you to manage your data online to save your time and money.