Local, state, regional and federal government agencies of all sizes and disciplines are a perfect environment for content management solutions. Agencies and departments are often hampered by the traditional expense, complexity and lack of flexibility that are central to many content management solutions.
Agencies at every level of government must interact with other agencies, not-for profit organizations and the private sector. Documents are created, development, edited, approved and distributed among many individuals and workgroups within and outside of specific agencies.
Large organizations, particularly government agencies tend to have formal processes for the creation, storage, management and archival of documents. Many of the processes for document management and the underlying technologies that are used to implement these processes are inflexible, expensive and cumbersome to use. These tools are not set up to enable fast moving projects, teams and individuals to come to together on a project.
Throughout an organization, individuals and work group need the ability to quickly, effectively and securely exchange files with all individuals and organizations associated with a given project. Documents must be kept secure from competitors. Traditional Document Management systems are difficult to use and impractical relative to the turnaround times that are required to keep the project on schedule.
Government agencies interact with many other organizations, each of which can have competing or incompatible content management solutions. Content Circles easily bridges that gap at an amazingly low price, with high security and incredible ease of use.
Document Management is traditionally expensive to acquire, implement and support. Many groups within an organization don’t want to invest the time and effort of their staff members to become experts in document management. It is a necessary process, but formal document management is comes with significant layers of overhead and expense. There is also a traditional resistance to document management because of the difficulty of quickly and easily adding or deleting individuals or companies to a workgroup without increasing complexity or cost. Many government agencies are very concerned about acquisition cost, Total Cost of Ownership (IT expense, staff time expense, server and networking expense, staff training expense, etc.) and ROI.
While government at many levels are moving to reduce the physical transfer of paper and move to an online model for interacting with constituents, the cost of this transition is often viewed as prohibitively high.
Key requirements for the creation and distribution of documents include speed, confidentiality, mobility, version control and security. The Content Circles team, veterans of years of developing the most secure, bulletproof content management applications available, focused all of its attention on meeting these key needs and delivering virtually transparent ease of installation and use.
Time is extremely valuable and the frictionless, secure exchange of the most current, up to date documents is a critical component of success. Government agencies at all levels are increasingly measuring and being measured by the effectiveness and efficiency of their operational processes. Content Circles is an excellent, low cost method for improving workflow, while also ensuring document confidentiality, easy accessibility and automatic document backup. Traditional means of document transfer including US mail, overnight delivery, or legacy third party upload and download tools or such as email or FTP are simply outdated and inefficient. Many of these methods are notorious insecure, slow and unreliable. A few agencies have experimented with free hosting services, but are very concerned about the security of the data and potential liability if confidential information is stolen or fall into the wrong hands.
- It is critical to ensure that all parties have quick access to the correct documents.
- If the members of a project workgroup cannot quickly move large files among authorized members of a work team, costs are incurred and deadlines are missed.
- Documents must be backed up
- Documents must be easily accessible
- Documents must be secure
- Access rights must be easy to establish and maintain
- Who on the team is working on the most current, most accurate version of the document?
- Did we get the right version to the correct team members for review?
These questions inevitably plague every team on a project. Content Circles simplifies the organization, tracking, revision control and monitoring of who has accessed the documents, when the changes were made and in what order. There is never any question about who has he most up to date version of a document. The revision control and document tracking capabilities of Content Circles quickly and easily identify that information.
Regardless of the role of an individual, agency or company in a project, all constituents work in tight deadlines and high pressure, results-driven environments. Documents are created collaboratively and must be reviewed and approved at many levels of an organization. Multiple people at all levels of several organizations required to sign-off on the final product.
There are many phases of any project where document confidentiality is critical. Staff members must be 100% confident that no unauthorized users can gain access to these files. Third party servers and hosting providers add a layer of risk into any transaction. Content Circles eliminates that risk by passing files, through a secure link, directly between the creator of the document and its intended recipients, without an intermediary.
The mix of individuals assigned to a work group or team includes in-house staff, agency staff, management, and any authorized individual from an outside organization assigned to the team. Some members of the team are employees of the client or agency, but many are not. The systems that govern the computers of such a mixed workgroup can create havoc when an organization tries interact with other companies that utilize legacy content management systems or have document distribution policies that make the flow of information difficult.
Content Circles eliminates the need for overlapping systems by creating a secure P2P connection between authorized team members, regardless of what network they are on or their physical location.
Employees, contractors, and service providers in government at all levels increasingly work in highly mobile environments, away from their offices. They need instantaneous access to the most current documents and cannot be constrained by firewalls or having to upload and download documents to and from third party service providers. They need documents now and they need to be certain of their authenticity and version.
Content Circles can function in an online or offline environment. When working offline, documents stored in Content Circles synchronize automatically and in the background the next time a connection is made to the work group. Workgroup members can be connected and synchronized together or through the Content Circles Private Team Cloud, thus ensuring real-time synchronization whenever an internet connection is established.
Content Circles builds redundancy into the core of the product and offers the capability at no extra charge. The application always backs up the documents stored in Content Circles. Whether that redundancy is delivered by other members of the workgroup (where the files are replicated automatically) or from documents stored through the easy to set-up and use Content Circles Private Team Cloud, customers never have to worry about an outside service provider outage. It is only through years of experience building highly secure and complex enterprise content management solutions, that the team has been able to build such advanced technology into a peer-to-peer application.
Government agency staff today do not have time to learn to use new products an technologies, so it is incumbent on providers to build and deliver solutions that require little to no training, no IT resources, no custom network, database or server resources. The solutions should just work out of the box.
Content Circles is the perfect solution for government agencies of all sizes. It is highly affordable, easy to install and use and a single solution provides both distributed content management, document tracking and revision control. Content Circles is the perfect supplement to existing content management solutions, because participants is a work group can be easily added, modified or deleted in seconds, without having to buy additional fixed licenses of the corporate content management solution that might be limited to employees or locked behind a firewall. Automated backup and restore come with the solution free of charge.
With Content Circles, the right documents are available at the right time and place, whenever they are needed. The documents are up-to-date, secure and readily accessible.
Contact Content Circles today at info@contentcircles.com, or 650.847.5739 to learn more about how Content Circles can help your organization. www.contentcircles.com