Ten Things You Should Know About Document Distribution

It's distribution that really makes documents powerful. When your prospective customer receives your sales letter, or when warehouse personnel receive the order dispatch advice, or when the shop floor manager receives the day's production schedule, your business gets moving. It's documents produced in a court of law that proves your claims, and so on.

1. Business transactions typically require collaborative working, which require effective communications among the workers. Well-designed document distribution systems can improve the speed and effectiveness of the communications, and even the performance of collaborator roles.

2. Electronic documents can be attached to predefined or ad hoc approval processses to ensure that they reach all persons who have to work on them. Electronic Document Management (EDM) systems will alert the recipients about the documents that need their attention and thus expedite work performance.

3. Documents can be distributed in different ways. In addition to the workflows that keep the document moving internally, there are e-mails, bulletin boards, Web conferences and intranets that can make documents available to persons inside and outside the organization.

4. One issue that can arise during collaborative working when multiple persons work on the same document is that of avoiding overwrites of each other's updates. If two or more persons work on the same document at the same time, it is possible that one person's updates can be overwritten by another person. To avoid this possibility, EDM systems typically offer check-in and check-out tools that permit only one person to make changes to a document at one time.

5. Different kinds of document distribution require different kinds of actions to ensure that the communication is received (or demonstrated as likely to be received) by the recipients. E-mails have to pass successfully through e-mail spam filters, postal mail might need to be posted under certificate of posting, and so on.

6. Where electronic documents are distributed widely to the public, as in the case of electronic white papers, readability can become an issue. If the document is prepared using a proprietary application, the recipients might not have the relevant software to read the document. Tools like the freely downloadable Adobe Reader seek to solve such problems.

7. Document distribution can also occur when relevant documents supporting your claim in litigation are sent to attorneys of the other party. In these cases, the issue of "redaction" becomes relevant. While you are obligated to produce information that supports your contentions, you are allowed to remove parts of the content that can harm your case. Care is needed to ensure that this is utilized. Careless distribution can mean that such data can reach the other party, say in the form of invisible metadata attached to electronic documents.

8. Instead of sending sensitive documents outside the organization, external parties can be allowed to inspect them in a data room, virtual or real, in the organization. This is the typical practice in the case of due diligence investigations as part of M&A and loan negotiations.

9. When electronic documents are distributed over the Web, there is a possibility that their content might be tampered with during transmission or at other points in the route. Encryption and document locking are often used to prevent this. Encrypted documents can be opened only by a recipient who has the relevant key. Locked documents cannot be modified further.

10. Document distribution can prove an expensive affair. To reduce costs, and increase effectiveness, you can entrust the task to third party fulfillment services. The service providers will typically have the facilities, procedures, and experience to ensure cost-effective document distribution.

Documents such as brochures and correspondence serve their purpose only when distributed to relevant recipients. Internally, it's the distribution of documents to concerned employees that gets the operations of the business to flow smoothly. Considering the variety of documents and the different document distribution practices, costs of distribution can reach unreasonable levels unless the process is systematized.