My journey to creating a digital document system that works for me. (Part 1)

For years I have been working towards creating a system in both my work and home environments that is completely digital and accessible from anywhere with any device of my choosing. Because of several technologies, software packages and cloud based services I believe that I have reached that goal very closely.

 In recent years Microsoft has provided a good bit of the technology and services that are helping me achieve this. Office 365 with both its Office Suite Products and Cloud Storage Services are keys in giving me access to and creation of a totally digital environment that help in the creation of digital documents, but also provides the access and ability to search for information as needed. These are important concepts to consider when moving into a complete digital environment.

Software I use to create my documents.

• ·         Microsoft Word – The creation of product sheets, manuals, knowledge base papers is only part of what is important for doing my job. Creating form documents or templates that help to collect data from clients is a big part of what we do and centralizing that data in SharePoint where many people can have access to these tools is important.
• ·         Microsoft Excel – I crunch numbers all the time and Excel is a great tool for doing so. It also provides a great platform to create parts lists, product pricing, or a very good form structure for collecting and using data.
• ·         PDF – While I use several programs to create, manipulate and view PDF files (Nitro Pro, Adobe Reader, Adobe Writer to name a few) most applications now allow you create PDF’s directly from the program with built in utilities or you can use the Microsoft Print to PDF printer option. PDFs provide a fixed format, shareable, low storage space solution to provide a standardized document format.
• ·         OneNote -This Microsoft program has been central in my life for years. This concept of a digital notebook that is freeform for data collection and is easily searchable both in typed characters but also for handwritten notes. This latter will become more important as I discuss more about this journey. OneNote gives you the ability to create multiple notebooks to separate purposes and access them but within each notebook you have many options you can use to group information to make access to it at a later date even easier.

Cloud Storage Services.

Over the years I have used four services for document storage through the internet until I finally settled with Microsoft. A lot of people I know use Google Documents and File Storage but this never really caught on for me. The Google Docs word processing program always came up short for my needs, so I always stayed with Word. One of the first cloud storage services I used was DropBox but with the advent of Microsoft’s OneDrive and SharePoint I was quickly converted to using Microsoft’s Services, especially because they were a part of the O365 product stack and didn’t cost extra.

• ·         OneDrive – Included with several of the Office 365 plans, you have 1TB of storage for personal use that you can increase in 100GB increments as necessary. For me, I use this space to store not only personal documents but also scanned documents to get rid of the paper clutter at home. Invoices, warranties, contracts, tax information, medical and more I have segmented by year so that I can easily access them. The only thing that I haven’t moved over to OneDrive are my pictures. I use SmugMug for that storage.
• ·         SharePoint – Included with several of the Office 365 plans as well, you have 1TB of storage that is shared within your organization.
• ·         SmugMug – this is a paid for service that is specific for storing photographs. The reason I use it is because you don’t lose ownership of the files and they are not converted to another format. Amazon, Google and more all will take ownership of your files and convert them to their own photo standard. With this service I have offsite storage of my photos as well as having them locally. You can also set the photos up in their own galleries to allow easy access to others that you share the site with.

All these services provide access control to the stored data and have IOS and Android apps that allow access to the data stored as well as PC access through browsers and other applications.

These services and software packages provide my current tool kit that I use for my digital document creation, storage and access. In Part 2 of this document series I will be discussing my choices of products that I have used in the past and what I am using now to create the different workflows for collecting new information, creating new documents and accessing them day to day.