Salesforce Integration makes Record Compliance Easy

How do we make sophisticated record management systems easier to work with? One way is to wrap them with a modern technology everyone loves to use. This article looks at the benefits of wrapping Micro Focus Content Manager (CM) with Salesforce.

Every business document is associated with someone or something. It is usually a person, organization, product, or interaction. These entities already exist in Salesforce and can have documents attached to them: e.g. Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Cases, Opportunities, and Products.

While attached documents in Salesforce are associated with an entity, Salesforce does not have the robust record compliance features required by many businesses (and often by regulation). The solution is to integrate with a record management solution like Micro Focus Content Manager (CM). Salesforce users working with leads contacts, accounts, etc, can then upload an attachment and have it automatically filed to CM along with the required metadata.

Benefits of Integration

In a perfect world, the Salesforce schema would be mirrored to CM but life is usually not that simple. Any integration, therefore, has to have a number of auto-mapping options including the auto-creation of containers and sub-containers, filing based on the record type, and manual container selection from Salesforce. FuseIT's Salesforce to Micro Focus Content Manager integration, T4S, supports this and a number of CM taxonomies. The T4S features include:  

T4S is a highly secure way to file and access CM documents. Users are first required to access Salesforce and only after that, can they authenticate into CM by entering their CM username and password. Documents are transacted directly between the customer's Salesforce instance and their own CM network and never stored in a third-party system.

Salesforce as an Entry Point

Using Salesforce as a record management entry point has many advantages:

• Automation increases the number of records saved to CM
• Automating filing saves time and money
  • Eliminates repetitive filing tasks
  • Documents, along with metadata, are filed in the background
  • Document retrieval is faster
• Ensures documents are saved to the correct CM location 
• Users stay in the context of Salesforce making them more efficient
• More users can access CM without additional costs
• Documents are moved out of Salesforce reducing Data Storage Costs
• CM records are linked to their Salesforce record improving referential integrity

Salesforce users, therefore, are removed from the rigors of record management. For example, from inside Salesforce, they have the ability to search and find CM documents, open and edit them, then queue them for re-insertion back into CM.

Integration also makes it easy to insert documents into CM from emails i.e. strip the attachments from inbound emails and have them auto-inserted to CM.  A working example is where complaint emails are received with important attachments. The emails are mapped to a Salesforce object (e.g. a Salesforce case via Outlook integration) where the attachments are automatically stripped off and sent to CM. An access link in the related Salesforce object makes it easy for users to view and edit the documents.

Beyond user satisfaction, financial savings should not be overlooked. Salesforce only comes with 10GB of file storage for Enterprise and above. Additional file storage is based on the number of standard user licenses - 2GB of file storage per user license, and Salesforce charges for each extra gigabyte. While this may work for smaller companies, larger enterprises can quickly consume their file allocation to the extent that file storage fees can surpass user licensing fees.

Conclusion

Organizations burdened with record compliance obligations and complex systems can look at using integration to improve efficiencies, cut costs, and make life easier for users. Using modern cloud-based systems, like Salesforce, to wrap the record management platform enables only the necessary features to be exposed to the end-user. The association linkages formed by integration, improve document accessibility and improve integrity as well as the many other benefits mentioned above. 

If you are interested in learning more about T4S, or its lightweight alternative, S2T, please contact us for more information.