Streamline project documentation with Smart Document Types

Imagine the chaos. You’re a project manager juggling dozens of documents—business cases, plans, budgets, presentations, timesheets, blueprints and more. Keeping track of everything can be a nightmare. 

The problem is that not all documents are equally important. Some are crucial for specific project phases, while others take on specific roles for creation and approval. Traditional document management struggles to enforce these rules, leaving too many decisions to humans, which at the very least consumes a lot of time—time that can be put to better use. 

Controlling the Chaos with Smart Document Types

Smart Document Types, a built-in library of capabilities within OpenText™ Content Management (Extended ECM), bring automation and organization to your project documentation. They help control the chaos by automating many of the repetitive, low-value tasks associated with traditional document management.

Let’s take a closer look at one particular document type: the Project Management Plan.

• In the Planning phase of a project, a project plan is mandatory.  
• The file is expected to be stored in the Planning folder.  
• The project plan must be written and uploaded by someone in the Project Management role.  
• A person from the steering committee must approve the upload. 
• The date of the last review must be saved with the document. Project plans lose their validity after 3 months and must be revised regularly.  

To configure the appropriate Smart Document Type, you choose from a growing library of automated bots:

• File automatically: Store the document type in the designated folder. 

• Enrich with metadata: Select a category for the metadata. Make attributes mandatory if you need them completed during upload. 

• Add conditional logic: Form a logical statement from attributes. The Smart Document Type takes effect only if this statement is true. In our example, the attribute Project Phase must have value Planning. 

• Make relevant for the right persons: Select the role or group who is responsible for this type of document. Only these users can select the document type during upload.  

• Make mandatory: If this document type is not present in the business workspace, it is shown as missing in the workspace header.  

• Define document validity period: A document may only be valid for a certain period. This expiration date is calculated from a date attribute in the metadata. When the expiration date is reached, an icon in the business workspace header indicates the outdated document to the impacted users.  

• Use approval workflows: Instead of directly uploading, a workflow is started to route the document to users or a group who can approve the upload. Only after approval, the document is uploaded to the business workspace. You can use our sample approval workflow or use your own.  

• Generate a document: Call on OpenText Content Management’s document generation capabilities to generate another document in a subsequent process.  

Using this same library of bots, you can now define Smart Document Types for other project management documents:  

• Timesheets: Mandatory for everybody in all phases.  

• Agendas & minutes: Not mandatory, can be uploaded by every team member and needs no approval. 

• Budget plan: Mandatory in Planning phase for members of the Controlling role. Expires in 1 month.  

• Project evaluation: Mandatory but only in Closing phase.  

… and so forth 

Once your Smart Document Types are in place, you may ask yourself, “how do I persuade our users to select document types and provide metadata for each upload?” Well, you can prompt them. There is a general option in the workspace template that will force users to select a document type and follow the formal upload process every time they upload a document.  

Smart Document Types are your tool of choice if you manage a business process with well-defined document types. Use Smart Document Types to help your users properly contribute to structured file storage and actively manage content.