TIMS vs Shared Folder

1. Folders can be laborious to set up and when folders are set up they tend to be static in terms of location and access permission

1. Dynamic file sharing and automatic systematic storage makes saving and retrieval easy and flexibility

2. The shared folder creates confusion on locating the correct folder to store and retrieve documents and therefore is often not utlised

2. File tagging is made easy and therefore staff are not only encouraged to use TIMS but often TIMS automatically becomes a company policy

3. The shared folder relies on the strict implementation on a document naming policy which most staff do not adhere to and therefore version control is weak.

3. TIMS automatically offers clarity in the document lifecycle so you can easily identify the version of the document you desire to retrieve

4. Often audit trail of a document cannot be tracked through the shared folder

4. TIMS has an automatic logging system which logs the time, personnel and details of changes at every stage of the document.

5. The shared folder does not record and store relationships between documents

5. Often documents are related to one another in a few ways. TIMS allows documents to be linked together for easy identification

6. Anyone can access , change, move or delete a document within a folder

6. Permission settings to access or change documents are easily determined by the author and users of the documents

7. Searching for a specific document or set of documents within many folders can be difficult and take a long time

7. Title, meta data or full text searching is very easy to enable you to locate the exact document quickly

8. A shared folder cannot easily store text or document contents from emails, faxes and scanned documents

8. TIMS automatically captures all incoming and outgoing data for easy storage and retrieval

9. Data security tends to be lacking as anyone having access to the server can retrieve and change documents

9. Data in the TIMS system is user defined and encrypted to protect all documents

10. Disaster recovery often difficult if at all possible because often folders are not well set up and data is not saved in folders

10. Disaster recovery is a breeze because of the TIMS central document and data repository

11. The shared folder does not include a database management system which is very useful to manage data

11. TIMS has a highly customisable database management system to store data such as company and client directories, client codes, or any other list.