How you manage your documents should be structured around the risk to the company. In a law firm, structuring a legal response around an incorrect precedent is high risk, using the wrong annual leave form is not (unless of course you can’t go on holidays then the risk lies with the employee!). Having a document control system that can manage both scenarios is desirable but not a necessity. There are some things that are just so mission critical, just so commercially sensitive that they deserve the ‘extra hard yard’ of control to ensure things go right. And so putting them on ‘google docs’ might not be the best solution, but in so many ways , it might. It really is a mine field of exposure, mitigation and downright dumb luck. And these are just the documents that you have complete control of. Then there is the wonderful world of external documents. Those things that you need to use, adhere to but you don’t publish or control. Forget just having a clever repository for them, you will need a process of review, issue and recall to ensure things go right, especially in the field. A great example of this would be drawings or specifications used at a construction site.
So I suspect you are now expecting a solution to all this. Sorry to disappoint, but there is no definitive solutions to these complex needs. Some are better than others. Some are just wrong. So here is a very simple list to review when considering your document management; MS SharePoint, Google Docs, DocuShare, Base camp, just to name a select few. There are so many available via the cloud and some more worthy than others for review. The main selection criteria you should consider are, single source of data, check in / out capability, version control, distribution control, data backup / recovery and others. Good luck.
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