Since AT8 started over three years ago, we’ve tried to embrace technology within our own enterprise as we think it important to ‘practise what we preach’.
We use internet hosted email services, blogs and newer social networking tech like Twitter and are always keeping an eye on new innovations that are relevant and that we think are not too flippant or faddish.
As all of us are away from the office a great deal and one area that has always been a bit of a struggle has been creating, checking and publishing documents, either for our clients or for public consumption – endless emails to-ing and fro-ing from individuals, attempting to keep in some sort of sequence and ensuring compliance with corporate style guidelines etc.
We needed to find a way of being able to manage the process better and searched for a web-based solution to help – now, within a more conventional office environment tools such as Microsoft Sharepoint have the ability to offer document management and control but as we don’t have our own dedicated infrastructure, that wouldn’t help us. We wanted to have a virtual document repository with full control and versioning – there are a number out there, but we settled on a service called huddle. Huddle has a range of service options, from free (with advertising) to a top flight offering that provides customisation and branding coupled with a range of storage capacities. Huddle helps us by notifying when documents are uploaded to it, tracking versions and owners and informing team members when documents are ready to be approved. Approvals can be sought from any number of individuals in the team, with document locking when one team member has ‘booked’ it out for amendment.
Since using huddle, we have been able to create a definitive master document library which goes someway to prevent the tendency for people to hoard their own versions (that may or not be inline with company style guidelines) – it certainly seems to have enhanced our productivity.
Another great example of an innovative, cloud-based solution.
