Innumerable documents and concepts are produced in areas such as sales, marketing, personnel and related departments like service. External parties are also frequently involved in these areas: customer contacts or advertising agency employees. All these areas predominantly work with the Microsoft Office product family. These documents form the basis of market studies, forecast reports, marketing documentation, inquiries, order confirmations and instruction manuals in the service field.

These documents are often administrated on employees' individual computers or on departmental servers under various directories. As a consequence, there is much redundant information. Internal IT resources, for example in the form of storage capacity, are occupied or even overloaded by countless copies of the same document. The search for documents needed immediately is clearly complicated if not fully impeded. Colleagues are refused access to data which is solely locally stored.

These aspects become significantly more complex when external parties become involved. It is common practice for marketing departments to cooperate with external agencies and service providers in order to implement marketing campaigns in a targeted way. How does data exchange for example look in practice there? Quite simply by sending e-mails. Briefing documentation is sent to suppliers by e-mail, is processed by them and is subsequently sent back again. Why not put all these aspects on an expedient and integrated basis and achieve cost advantages thereby?

COI-BusinessFlow offers you the solution for this. Full integration of Records Management and Information Lifecycle Management functions into the Microsoft Office interface make it easy for employees to transfer content easily, quickly and securely to a central platform. The content is available there at any time and at any location worldwide. Authorized external parties can access this documentation just like internal employees. COI-BusinessFlow also offers inclusion of the respective context in which the corresponding document was compiled. Therefore incoming inquires, all related customer information such as e-mails, internal reports or the tender can also be administrated in one file. A standardized company-wide solution is achieved by process mapping within the framework of Outlook integration.