| Have you ever stopped to think about what your company's most valuable asset is? For many companies, it's not the building, or the equipment, or even the employees. It's the data: the written records of customer, vendor, and employee information. How many of these data types are important to your company's success?
- Customer mailing addresses
- Order history data
- Customer service correspondence
- Current inventory listing
- Accounts payable/receivable
- Vendor contact/payment information
- Payroll/employee data
- Proposals and estimates
- Internal memos
- E-mail archives
The NetDocuments concept
NetDocuments is an Internet-based service from HP that provides a central storage system for a company's documents. This storage system can be accessed through any Internet connection 24 hours a day, from anywhere in the world, and it is completely secure. It's as secure as a bank vault, yet as easy and convenient to access as an ATM. And for many businesses, it's the ideal solution to their document management problems.
Let's say that Jane Anderson, a manager, wants to make a particular document available to all her employees plus some of her customers. She simply saves it to a NetDocuments folder and then grants permission to those people to access that folder. Each person can then connect to the NetDocuments Web site at his or her convenience, log in, and access that file. Depending on the permissions Jane grants, other users might be able to make changes to the document (which would be tracked so Jane could see who was doing what), or they might only be able to read, copy, and print it.
What NetDocument offers
Instant access to documents -- No matter where you are
Whether you're at your company's main office or an airport in Brussels, access to your documents need not be an issue. Since documents are stored on the NetDocuments server, rather than on any particular computer, it's equally easy to access them from any location in the world.
Document backup and safety
If -- heaven forbid -- your corporate headquarters should burn down, can you be sure that all the data on all the individual hard disks in the building would be salvageable? Probably not. But data stored in NetDocuments is 100 percent safe. HP has put the power of a large corporation into the security of the NetDocuments servers, and the result is a much more reliable and secure system than the average small business could ever afford.
User-level document security features
With NetDocuments, you don't need a network administrator in order to set up a sophisticated system of permissions for a particular set of documents. It's as easy as point-and-click to specify who may see or change a particular group of documents. You can provide your customers with access as well.
Flexible filing systems for maximum efficiency
The company's NetDocuments online filing cabinet can be as large or small as needed, and can contain multiple levels of organization. For example, you could have a Marketing folder, and within it folders for each Marketing employee, and within that folders for each project. Your company has complete control over the folder structure at all times.
Is it right for you? a cost-benefit analysis
Let's use a five-person company as an example. For five users and 1.00 GB of pooled storage space, the annual fee (with two months free, for a limited time) is US$480. Additional users are US$96 each per year. If you need additional storage during some months, you can have it -- additional storage is billed monthly, but only for the months you need extra space. You can also invite an unlimited number of external users to access your storage area. Each of these external users gets up to 3MB of free personal space, in addition to being able to access files in the shared folders.
Is this a good deal? It can be, depending on what you are currently paying in terms of hardware, personnel, and problem resolution. To evaluate your situation, add the following costs:
- Cost of buying and maintaining computer hardware for storing data locally.
- Salary/benefits costs for employees who must manage locally stored data.
- Salary/benefits costs for employees who must perform regular data backups.
- Costs associated with data security.
For more information
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